Table of Contents
Liquipedia in Numbers II
Staff Update
New Games - New Wikis
Dota 2 - From the beginning to now
WCS Portal - Revamp
Bracket Contest
How You Can Contribute
Stories from the Twitterverse
Out of the Blue
Hey, it's been a while. We're sorry we've been out of touch. Sometimes things just… things just pile up, you know? Things like doing updates and stuff. Easy to get lost in that, right? So how have you been? We'd love to know what you've been up to, we hope you'll write back. Anyway, here's what we've been up to since Christmas before last. We know its a bit long winded, but so much has happened since we spoke last, and even all of this is far from everything! We'll try our best to keep you up to date more often. We promise.
Yours forever,
Liquipedia
Liquipedia in Numbers II
A little over a year ago we made an infographic with some stats from Liquipedia and it got quite a bit of attention, so we decided to do a new one. Sadly, we can't just link to the old one for comparison, as the way Google analyses the data has changed slightly since last year. That gives us all the more reason to provide a comparison between the previous 2 years, and who doesn't like numbers? So we will provide the comparison in this one. Here's a lot of colourful graphs and columns and most importantly, numbers, for your enjoyment, compiled by fusefuse!
Staff Update
Seeing as we haven't done this in a long long while, we have quite a few new staffers. We've been hard at work bringing fresh blood onto our team
Here's a complete update about our new staff members:
Epoxide, fusefuse, Tephus, imallinson, NovemberstOrm - CONGRATULATIONS!
Epoxide is also one of the driving forces behind BW coverage; fusefuse is a part of the graphics team; Tephus makes the magic happen with the Dota 2 coverage team; and Epoxide, imallinson and NovemberstOrm insert numbers, names, and games like there's no tomorrow for the Team Liquid Police Department.
We'd also like to extend our congratulations to tofucake, Noam, PhiLtheFisH, Epoxide, and ChapatiyaqPTSM for graduating top of their class and acquiring Blue Names for their exemplary performance!
New Games - New Wikis
In August 2013, Hearthstone, a CCG made by Blizzard, was released into Beta. With this, talks of a Wiki began, and shortly after, on October 17th, work began. it had been over a year since the last Wiki—Dota 2—was launched. And with a new Wiki comes new problems, and a lot of things to do: like making new templates. For example, the template for displaying brackets – they look quite nice, don't they?
With the implementation of Semantic MediaWiki, pages such as the one on the left have become generated automatically, which is super useful and allows for less manual work, allowing contributors to focus on improving other things. After work from contributors for a few months, the Wiki was released on January 14th. Currently we're still seeing improvements to the Wiki as expected, stuff like the tournament schedule – made by PhiLtheFisH. This is another automatically generated page: it gathers tournament data from the info boxes and compiles it onto that page. Player pages is currently one area we still need to improve on, and as always we need your help if you're willing. Feel free to contact a staff member if you don't know where to get started.
But wait, there's more!
We're working on both a Wiki for Heroes of the Storm and Super Smash Brothers Melee, to cover the game with a focus on the esport scenes. If you're interested in helping us set them up, feel free to drop a staff member a message or even a line in this thread, or join us on IRC!
Dota 2 - From the beginning to now
Over a year since it was launched, our Dota 2 Wiki has come a long way. However it's still a long way from its full potential. Amazing stuff is popping up, like the new Dota 2 hero cosmetic pages. These edits are by ahswtini, who is leading the charge for adding cosmetic items to the wiki:
This is in most parts thanks to the amazing contributions of our users, of course. And to the staff who are helping and guiding the progress, most notably: miwi, Tephus, and imallinson (he's totally all-in-son) who have done a great deal to improve it.
Also, the Heroes page now looks more sharp with aligned text
A feature introduced to make contributing even easier!!!
When you edit a page, look at the toolbar above the editing box, then go to Advanced, at the end of the Advanced drop-down menu you'll see 2 gear icons. Once you've entered Dota 2 match IDs on separate lines, you can click on one of these icons to generate code for all the details of the match, which is really cool!!! And it reduces the manual work contributors have to do by quite a bit.
More details here.
WCS Portal - Revamp
Last year we made a portal for WCS which was very well received, revamping and improving upon the design of last year is what brought us to this design:
Things we took with us from the old one:
- Region color coding, this makes it simpler to understand which region is which, especially helpful in the calendar where the regions intermingle and when doing distribution graphs for non-WCS tournaments.
- Rankings overview and rankings in player infoboxes.
- Huge you-can't-miss-this-link-unless-you're-as-blind-as-Kaelaris button on the main page.
New enhancements:
- Each region has its own tab.
- The schedule will give a big overview of what happens when and where. We had a schedule last time, but the new one shows the time in a much simpler, sort of regular calendar, layout that most of us should be somewhat familiar with from school, if nowhere else.
- The rankings showcases the fight for getting a spot better and not just the top 16 players that will qualify but some of the players that are close to get into the top too.
- Less work for keeping the portal up to date. Since it will only be when a new stage of a tournament is started that a change will need to be made.
Bracket Contest
Recently we invited all of you to join us in our second ever bracket contest (the first being TSL 3 back in 2011). This time it was for the final stages of WCS Season 1 with a signed Team Liquid jersey of your choosing on the line. In case you missed that, don't despair - I promise you won't have to wait another 3 years for your next chance. In fact, we plan to make this a regular feature from now on, and they won't be limited to StarCraft II, either.
We want to especially congratulate the winner Soke, who won with an almost perfect WCS EU prediction, despite not having a GSL bracket at all. Soke edged out the win a mere 2 points ahead of the second place finisher Necro)Phagist(.
How You Can Contribute
So sometimes people tell us that they'd like to contribute, but that whenever they click to edit in a result someone else has already done it, so they end up not contributing to Liquipedia.
The fact is, that there are tons of ways to contribute to Liquipedia, besides updating tournament results as they happen. Here are some of them:
- Whenever you watch or read an interview with a player/team/personality, check to see if the interview is added to the corresponding person's, organization's, and/or event's page.
- Whenever you're watching a VOD, check the tournament page to see if it's linked from the match details (either matchlist or bracket).
- Ask permission of photographers and right holders of photos if they would be so kind to allow Liquipedia to use their images.
- Write about players, teams or events. For example, about 50,000 people viewed IdrA's article in the days following his release from EG. Player pages as well as team pages get a lot of exposure.
- Update the result on the Recent Tournament Result page.
- Fix spelling and grammatical errors. You can even hit the “Random page” link to go through many pages without having to put in too much thought about how to find the next page.
- Add references to articles. There is a lot of information that could be referenced in the articles, but it does require a lot of work. So if you happen to know that there was some interview or some talk show where a specific topic was discussed, or some editorial where a particular detail was pointed out, add a reference to it.
- Create a tournament article framework from scratch, setting up all the elements that will go in it after the format has been released, this will make it much easier for other people to fill in the necessary parts as more information is released.
- Let other people know that anyone can contribute to Liquipedia. And that there are a lot of things that can be done.