Foreword

Unlike my first blog, this one is very late, around half a year to be honest. But I’ve had other things going on in my life and other priorities than underlining my own brilliance in poorly written prose.

My Second Year With Liquipedia

The second year had me starting as a one of five active Liquipedia staff members, and it ended as me as Head of Liquipedia with about 10 active staff members, a Red Name on TeamLiquid and as part time employee for TeamLiquid. This was not something I had expected when my second year started, the 1st of November, 2011.

Templates

My second year started with me working on a new template project. I had thought that making links across tables would be a great idea, especially when the brackets were huge and spanned multiple pages, such as MLG. Where it was nigh-on impossible to follow a single player from the open bracket to the championship bracket. Or to sometimes even find where a player started. So I went through a huge list of bracket templates and added anchors. Making it possible to link together a upper bracket with a position in a lower bracket, at the cost of adding an arrow in the bracket.

This template has since fallen into disuse, it is still used on the GSL pages to help with the drop downs. Perhaps it has almost disappeared due to having to add so many additional variables.

The number of different template projects I worked on sank this year though, the biggest one was probably the one where we changed how we do the team template.

Optimization

One problem we have on Liquipedia is our reliance on templates to do a lot of repetitive tasks much much simpler for us. For example instead of writing out the file link and team name with links each time we have a template called Team to do this for us, where we just have to write {{Team|tl}} and we get the nice icon and text. However this template is pretty big, and it was also used on a lot of pages multiple times, when it was used. One of the bad things with Media Wiki’s parser is how it handles multiple uses of templates (or transclusions).

When you have a page that uses two template calls of {{team|tl}} firstly it does not cache this because it uses a variable so it will parse the template twice. and when I say parse I mean it opens up the page Template:Team and puts in tl as the variable 1 and executes the page. In the old system this mean it did checked if tl would be the same as another value an average of 100 times, (checking a if two pieces of text match each other is one form of a function call.) So for this page I would make on average 200 function calls just because I wanted to not have to put in the file link and text by hand.

So to fix this issue I first started to make a template system that checks the initial letter of the variable (this costs 2 function calls) and then it checks only the teams that uses that initial letter so at most it went through 29 initial letters and then usually a list of less than 20 subsequent variables to a maximum of 35 function calls. All the initials and team variables were sorted on how often they were used on the wiki, to make the template as optimal as it could be. This did indeed make some difference. Now the average was about 14 function calls per time you used the template, but that means for our hypothetical page it still did 28 function calls. And for a common use page where the template were used up to a 100 times, often with many duplicates of the same variable it meant it was still far from being optimized.

The solution is to actually not use variables, and instead to just use sub pages, so that {{Team/tl}} gives the user what they want. Because this then needs to be further defined because there were other variables someone could use, for example to only have the image, or have a shortened name form or have the image on the right side of the text rather than the left. We had to make a huge family of templates all with sub pages of all the teams. This was one of the largest undertakings and luckily I did not do this by myself. And most of that credit goes to shz, pPingu, blahz0r, miwi, and Noam.

Collaboration

If you decide to contribute to a wiki, where there are other people contributing, you are forced to in some way collaborate with those people. This you can do more or less actively and be more and less cognizant of this fact. For me this has always been the great part of the wiki, getting to work together with other people.

In early February 2012 we launched the Liquipedia Contributor forum. A sub forum on TL where only people who are "contributors" of the wiki can get access. To be counted as a contributor you have to have earned a Silver Coin. This forum has indeed led to a lot of great collaborations between people, and made making huge improvements to the wiki much easier.

However I was hesitant about making this kind of forum though. For me I anticipated that this would render the discussion pages on the wiki less useful since less people would be using them. And while sadly this became the case, the benefit from the increased interaction between contributors far outweighs the negative aspects.

For example the +maps addition to group match tables was a great addition and showed just how fast a lot of people could give input and help out solve a problem. This process was outlined in one of our newsposts so if you want to read more about that just go here.

We’ve also had a lot of discussions about policies for example about which tournaments should be counted as premier, how to deal with players changing IDs, and a 100 other things.

Launching A New Wiki

So one of the biggest things happening during the second year was the development of our Dota 2 wiki. The first I heard of the Dota 2 wiki was Heyoka asking me during the winter what my thoughts were on how viable it would be for Liquipedia to start doing a Dota 2 wiki. I wasn’t too sure about this but giving it some thought I started to realize that it wasn’t just doable but we could actually offer something to the Dota 2 community that it was lacking. I also realized that even though we’d have to redo a lot of templates to suit the needs of Dota 2 that wasn’t such a big hurdle and that most of the stuff we’d need for a wiki of any kind that involved eSports or tournaments, we already had. I might have underestimated this a little bit though, there were indeed a huge need for templates to be made specifically for the new wiki, to suit its special needs.

Then it got quiet for a few months before Heyoka came back and asked me what we’d need to start doing the wikis, I said we’d need to set up the actual Media Wiki installations, and we got that a few days later. However Bumblebee had already started to try to create a tournament page for Dota 2 on Liquipedia 2, and it looked pretty okay. We got some people who were interested in doing work on the wiki and who were into Dota 2 to help out making a lot of the elements, templates and layouts for the different pages—miwi, JBright, blahz0r, Heyoka, and Bumblebee are the ones I recall from the top of my head. We tried to get a few key pages up to as high standard as we could, so when people were making new pages of that type they would kind of know where to put things.

About three weeks before The International 2 we kicked everything into overdrive, because TL as a whole would be revealing the Dota 2 expansions for TL about one week prior to the event. I remember for example working quite hastily trying to do the changes to the skin for Dota 2 so there would be a clear difference between the two wikis. So if you don’t like the colour choice for Liquipedia - Dota 2 then you know who to blame. And even though the wiki started out fairly empty, rather quickly a lot of new people rallied in to help it out and it started to quite rapidly take shape.

Management

Since I had joined the Liquipedia staff the person in charge of this section had always been Aesop. He’s a really cool guy, even though he’s German Hungarian. However he had become more and more busy with other things as his studies and family life took more and more of his time. Eventually he resigned and in so doing Liquipedia needed a new "Head". I was asked and after some days of contemplation, and asking Aesop what this would entail I accepted the position. The transition went pretty smooth though. As some of the things I already knew how to do.

Later that summer, about 2 years after I registered on TL and right before we launched the Dota 2 Liquipedia, HotBid approached me asking some questions about the amount of time I put into the wiki and if then eventually asked if I wanted to work part time with it, but pointing out the part time job would only be for managing the wiki, not actually editing it. I said I had to think it over cause I wanted to just go “Yes yes yes!” right away but I didn’t want to commit to something I couldn’t keep up, so spending like a day to really think it through I then came back with a positive reply.

Copyright

So one of the least talked about issues within the esports community is copyright infringements. They happen all the time, I think the most common one is music on streams, but that’s an issue for twitch. For Liquipedia the issue is mostly about images.

Our contributor itsjustatank, who himself is a photographer, brought up this issue and has worked really hard to get people to provide the copyright and licensing information, improving the file info template and making sure it was used for as many of the pictures as possible. This also was the start of a pretty huge undertaking where a lot of contributors and staff members started sending out requests to organizations for the right to use their copyrighted material on Liquipedia. We still don’t always get it right. Eventually we have deleted nearly 1000 images from the wiki due to unknown copyright status or known copyright status without permission to use. This was probably the most complicated thing for me as the Head of Liquipedia to manage, because it’s easy to pat people on the back saying “Thanks for this contribution!”, it’s much much harder to say “Hey, thanks for trying but you did something really bad so now we’re going to unmake all of your work, kkthxbai.” as the second one really demotivates people to contribute, no matter how softly and carefully you phrase it.

So if you’re an owner of images on Liquipedia and they are accredited wrongly or you have never given your permission to let them be used on Liquipedia feel free to contact me or anyone else on staff. If you are a photographer or owner of image copyrights and would like to allow Liquipedia to use your material, we’d love to hear from you too.

To Round Off

So this is some of the stuff that happened during my second year with Liquipedia, it was quite a huge ride, and so many unexpected things happened. During TSL3 we started getting a huge influx of people starting to contribute to the StarCraft II Liquipedia. My goal for this third year is to make the same thing happen for Dota 2. The visiting stats is starting to take off for it so I’m getting more and more confident it is going to happen, and really soon.
I also had the pleasure to meet some of the Liquipedia contributors in person this year, like miwi, Epoxide, fusefuse (thanks for the work on the logo), shz, and Andytb.
Finally I want to thank everyone I have had the pleasure to work together with, I only got to name a few of the people but there are so many more that deserves credit for their contributions to the wikis. Thank you.