Allow *Trusted* Developers to Write and Edit Tutorials, Articles, and API References

Bug Reports Documentation Issues
#8

This is a great Idea however I doubt that ROBLOX would allow for trusted Developers to edit a lot of the documents. Although if they had a request edit feature that trusted developers can use to fix typos and better explain things in libraries, this would be a better way for ROBLOX to allow their devs to Write and Edit them.

I also strongly believe that Developers should be allowed to Create and (atleast request) edit(s on) Tutorials as most of us have gone through the learning phase and might know how to better explain and easier teach to newer developers of the RDev community.

Overall I do agree with this suggestion and believe it could benefit everyone in the long run.

3 Likes
#9

I don’t think it’s a good idea, the developers who are given the permissions, even if they are trusted can use it to their advantage, or change stuff that’s alright 100% accurate and true. There’s no point in this, also roblox will never agree to this.

2 Likes
#10

The idea is fine but it won’t work. The trusted developers might mess up something in the API and make Roblox worst. I don’t think they should be able to do it even the trusted developers.

3 Likes
#11

Its an open secret among developers that the quality of Roblox documentation plummeted when community volunteers were pushed out and the IX team took over. The Dev Hub’s design is modern and easy to access, but the content just isn’t there. Not even mentioning lack of information and detail on many APIs, the amount of times I’ve seen information that’s just incorrect is worrisome.

38 Likes
#12

I am extremely disappointed by the state of the wiki. There is a ridiculous amount of inaccuracy, missing information, and errors. Some of these errors border on significant misinformation which is harmful for new developers and frankly embarrassing. None of my attempts to bring misinformation or missing information to attention has been taken to action despite significant delay.

In addition to this, new and revised tutorials on the wiki are significantly lower in quality than the previous ones. The new wiki has traded functionality for simply looking nice.

I hate to be this blunt, and I don’t mean any disrespect to the current contributors to the wiki, which is a major undertaking. However, in its current state, the wiki is not a useful resource.

I don’t get value from the wiki anymore. If I need to find something out, I look for topics on the dev forum. That is not the way it should be.

7 Likes
#13

I remember when the official Roblox Wiki worked like this. You would have trusted Wiki writers who could edit the documents and even create new ones (the latter was restricted to their personal namespace, though).

Trust was not a problem. The Wiki pages were always of high quality, and there were a lot of Roblox power users who didn’t get access when they should have. I’m hoping that we can find a good balance for trust if this gets implemented again.

6 Likes
#14

100% this. The old wiki might’ve not have looked as clean as the new Developer Hub, but the content definitely made up for it in my opinion. There needs to be a fair balance between content and accessibility, which is currently just not happening.

I can understand why there may be doubts about giving trusted users permission to edit, but abuse can easily be solved by post approval (something akin to the one used on these forums, for example) or other editors’ vigilance (something which is shown to work quite well on Wikipedia, for example).

7 Likes
#15

I think that people in the Community Sage or rarely the Top Contributor (or a special Application to select the trusted developers) should be able to edit the Dev hub.

3 Likes
#16

Or community members could submit articles for some form of community/IX approval, and if they are approved they are appended.

5 Likes
#17

What exactly was wrong with the original system to begin with? The new wiki is a major, major downgrade. There seems to be a new focus on new developers, but with the amount of dead links and BS or missing info I can’t see how that’s happening.

5 Likes
#18

I’d love to see a lot more tutorials for sure. Most of the time the Dev Hub just lists a tiny bit of code. It doesn’t help beginners at all. Web searches and Youtube videos are usually outdated. Roblox Lua is not vanilla Lua, so for beginners the pro Lua tutorials you do find don’t help very much.

If there are people here willing… why not start a free Github site with this kind of info? It’d be great if Roblox provided it though!

2 Likes
#19

As I implied before, the Hub is an extremely huge resource, and it’s put together by only a handful of people (Roblox Staff, I believe). This means that many API references and even articles may have typos or errors, and they will be overlooked until someone points them out in the Forum. But, if trusted developers are allowed to edit certain pages, then the mistakes can be fixed more easily. No one would ever need to report it in the first place. After all, maintaining a large website like the Hub requires more people, which is where the community comes in.

I see that this option would be very good for people but if a Developer, Say somebody was gonna edit a page. Then update it and wrong information came up, it wouldn’t mean help to anybody because they wouldn’t understand where to start and probably the author of the help article wouldn’t get notified about this so as Roblox, and roblox probably won’t edit it too because that page Belongs to the author.

2 Likes
#20

I have experienced an extreme amount of frustration as it seems the resource is slowly getting smaller as more and more links vanish over time.

2 Likes
#21

Which Is why I believe that trusted developers that highly known and trusted developers who want to contribute go through some sort of application and when they want a change in the forum they can make a draft and get it go be approved by a ROBLOX Website developer / Staff.

2 Likes
#22

I strongly support this.
I don’t like how so many of the API stuff is just explained in words without examples, it’s too hard to try and learn and there aren’t any tutorials around for a lot of it.

3 Likes
#23

Here’s a quick poll to gauge some opinions. This is really biased, but it doesn’t take much effort to vote.

  • I have found the new wiki slightly more useful, compared to the old one
  • I have found the new wiki significantly more useful
  • I have found the new wiki slightly less useful
  • I have found the new wiki significantly less useful
  • I have not experienced any difference in usefulness

0 voters

3 Likes
#24

First, I’ll respond to the OP on a per-reason basis.

Reason 1: Some things aren’t well explained. (I’m broadening this to the general API docs not just libraries here) We know – that’s why we have this forum category: so the community is in control of the spotlight about what needs improvement. Being a department under developer relations, the IX team has direct access to other teams at Roblox which the community does not normally have access.

If something needs an example, yes, you can write one right now! Put it in a post here, and let us do the work of getting it on the Hub. Is there a description that’s too complicated? Tell us, we can make it simpler. That’s why we have this forum category! If you’ve got expertise on an advanced subject, we have public community tutorial topics ready for your pen.

Reason 2, which I’ll rewrite as “extending the reach of community written content”. I think it’s a good idea that we could feature the best of the best via links on the hub to the forum. I’ll see if that can be made possible. In this way, you can retain control and the credit over the content you write. Search engines index results plenty of results from the forum!

Reason 3, the minutia: we’ve got a mega-thread for this where these can be fixed in bulk (see the stickied post). Typos may be low on the totem pole, but we’ll get around to them. More serious stuff, like broken code samples, will be fixed when we find them. We make every effort to make sure working, tested examples get on the Hub; however, content migrations from the wiki still exist in many nooks and crannies, which you guys are great at finding.

Reason 4, internationalization. We’ve built systems to efficiently translate the hub’s content by humans. You can still post your self-authored content to the forums in the appropriate language topic!

Hope this properly addresses why hand picking community members generally won’t work for the hub (you can message me directly if you have further questions). In my experience with the IX team, Roblox is more keen on hiring such help rather than hand-picking community members to do it for free like in the ye olde days of the wiki. @Maximum_ADHD, who was a huge help with both the wiki and the hub is proof positive of this.

This topic doesn’t seem to be going anywhere productive and has devolved into a rant about “old wiki better”, so I’m locking it. Whenever you find an issue, whether it’s missing or incorrect content, I implore you to tell us about it here. As a reminder, please be specific when doing so. “More examples!” doesn’t help as much as “More examples on RopeConstraint!”

5 Likes
#25
#26
#27

As a developer who is experienced with the Roblox API, the developer hub isn’t very useful to me. It’s often outdated, wrong, or unhelpful, and does not have any articles that benefit me. Even ones that should in theory benefit me (the article on the MicroProfiler comes to mind) aren’t specific enough to help me, often leaving me with questions I can’t answer from the DevHub. While information on the MicroProfiler is apparently coming Soon™, additional information on it was requested a year ago, and it is just now being dealt with.

While I try to make requests for pages I find lacking or that need improvements, a lot of things aren’t worth bothering with – documenting something like ValueBase is probably not a priority, and as a result will likely not be done for quite some time. It doesn’t feel worth my time to request it if there’s no guarantee it will go anywhere. If I had the ability to change the developer hub, I could just document it myself. Or heck, even if more people had access to it, using #platform-feedback:developer-hub would feel less futile because things would get done faster. As is though, it’s very defeating to be told “this isn’t a priority”.

The advantages listed by @Ozzypig to having a dedicated IX team have proven themselves to be non-existent in the last few months. Very few pages are internationalized (not even Workspace or All Tutorials have translations) and various updates haven’t made their way to the DevHub, even things like Removing Outlines which are the removal of a feature. In fact, the page on Lighting.Outlines explicitly says outlines are not deprecated in direct contrast to the large “Deprecated” banner that automatically appears.

The recourse we have as developers – the ability to request changes or additions – is not good enough. Things take too long to change, and the Roblox API is far too large for a small team of people to document and keep up to date on its own, let alone while translating pages, writing articles, and anything else that the IX team does.

Several large companies and organizations have ways to directly contribute to at least some documentation. Roblox should join them.

12 Likes