Forum:SH:Star Wars: Card Trader Project

Star Wars: Card Trader is one of our sources of information for Canon articles. As such, many of our Canon articles list Card Trader in the Sources list. Recently, we've begun listing Card Trader by individual card like we do for all other card sets, which ideally will include linking to images of Card Trader cards.

The problem we face with Card Trader is that it's a digital app, which means all of its data will be permanently lost the moment Topps decides to discontinue it. To this end,, , and I have begun a project to create a permanent reference database for these Card Trader cards. This database can be found on the Star Wars: Card Trader Wiki. Our basic goal is to capture screengrabs (both front and back) of any card with text on the back.

The bad news is that there are literally something like 40,000 cards on this app, with new ones being released every single day. The good news is very few of these cards have data on the back, and the app stopped releasing these data cards after 2015 (I believe), so this project is finite. The other non-data cards from this app are mostly just stylized artwork with no text or are otherwise just digital reissues of Topps' other concurrent physical card sets, all of which we can just ignore, because it's simply impractical to be listing 10,000 different artwork cards in Sources lists.

So to narrow down our focus with this project, this is what we need to be listing in Canon articles' Sources lists from Star Wars: Card Trader:
 * Any cards with data on the back (which we believe is relegated to just the "2015 Edition" cards) or cards with other unique textual canon information, such as new character names in the card title.
 * Any cards with unique film promotional images not yet released in any other Canon source; example, list the Card Trader card that was the first to show this Leesub Sirlin promo image.
 * We can disregard:
 * Multi-color parallel sets. For example, the 2015 Edition cards have Yellow, White, Red, Green, and Blue parallels, which are all exactly the same card just with different colored borders. We only need to list the card once in Sources lists, and we'll be taking screengrabs of the first-issued card, Yellow, for the database.
 * Legends. Some of these cards actually contained Legends references, which we just disregard for Canon articles, but our database will still be taking screengrabs of all 2015 Edition cards for archival purposes.
 * Non-exclusives. As stated above, Card Trader reissues digital editions of cards from Topps' other concurrent physical sets. Although these physical sets should be listed in Canon Sources lists, they don't need to be relisted from Card Trader. However, the database may still take screengrabs of these cards for their digital quality as the need arises.
 * Individual cards from Card Trader should be listed using the Topps template. Note that there is also a physical Star Wars: Card Trader set released in 2016 with no current documentation on Wookieepedia, which we will also need to work on at some point.

The database itself will accept any screengrab image from any card included in Star Wars: Card Trader, because it will be beneficial to have an archive of these cards. But realistically, we're probably never going to create a complete archive of all 40,000+ cards from this app, which is why our focus is on those cards with textual data.

If you want to help with this database project, this is what you can do. Our current checklist of objectives includes:
 * Create a complete checklist of all 2015 Edition cards. This checklist can be hosted on this SH page, where we can cross them off as we upload card images.
 * Take screengrabs of these 2015 Edition cards (both front and back of card) and upload these images to the SWTC Wiki. The primary focus should be on getting the 2015 Edition Yellow parallel cards, as explained above, as these card images are what we will be linking to from our Sources lists.
 * Create an article for each 2015 Edition card on SWTC Wiki, which is where these images will be hosted

Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 21:12, September 10, 2017 (UTC)