GuildWiki:Suggestions/Pricing guide

Prices are another feature of the game that GuildWiki has shied away from in the past for many good reasons.
 * 1) The potential for abuse is/was high. Vandals, sellers and buyers have plenty of reason to change articles so the documented prices suit their needs. Additionally, with high Recent Changes activity, such edits could easily be missed and thus have us listing false and damaging information.
 * 2) The market is highly volatile and prices can easily be out of date.
 * 3) There are many variables which contribute to prices: skins, req, mods, supply and demand, etc.
 * 4) Listed prices have the potential to affect the in game economy in a way that could cause us to define the prices rather than have our information be a reflection of the actual prices in game.

These are very good reasons to not have pricing information however, in a time when recent changes is very slow and little new content is being added to the game, pricing may become a more viable. Additionally, there are items in the game which have prices which remain close to static and also have less variability: tomes, Zaishen Keys, Lockpicks, Consumables, etc. Consider only having pricing information for those and similar things rather than a complete guide to all weapons, materials, etc.

Keep prices on user pages
The only way for this system to succeed is to have an easy way to identify abuse quickly. To that end, all pricing info should be placed in Userpage/price (possibly assisted by some Javascript) and taken from there to a price page for the item in question. The advantage of this is that it is easy to see on RC when a malicious user edits prices on a page other than his own, and article price pages should never be edited at all.

Users can then be rated for reliability and the collected prices weighted by date and user reliability for display on the article page. Information from external sources (stickies on forums, trades on forums) could also be used, possibly by making a shoe puppet user for each source and bot-o-matically updating the info.

It is vital that users can easily find the prices for related items.

Historical information should be kept and made into graphs, i.e. information should be dated and not deleted.

Trading system as incentive
Integrating some sort of trading system with the site would provide extra incentive for people to post prices.

Pros

 * 1) Draw significant traffic and new users who come to help maintain this information
 * 2) Provide an extremely useful service which adds our ability to provide information on Guild Wars; one more reason for people to "check the wiki".

Cons

 * 1) Same as before (listed above)
 * 2) Adding any automated, scripted, magical stuff would need to be designed, written, tested, etc.

Related links

 * Suggestions/Trade namespace
 * Guru Auction