EPT
Long time no blog, right? Time to change it!
Ok, because most of you probably don't know me, a short introduction to myself: I’m 16 years old, living in Germany and currently going to 11th grade. I’m not THAT active on TL (only a little bit more than 200 posts), but I’m spending most of my time on Liquipedia \Ü/
Since my last blog in the end of August, I’ve gone from 3k edits to over 7k, that’s something I’m actually a little bit proud of. With an increasing amount of edits, I’ve also earned more coins, I now have 3 golden Liquipedia coins. Let’s hope we won’t get an inflation :D
SMW
Most of my recent work on Liquipedia have been templates and SMW. You now may ask “What’s that? StarDust may win?”. Although StarDust might win another tournaments, it has another meaning in the context of wikis: Semantic MediaWiki. Now you may ask what’s that. Take some time and let me explain the basics:
Generally, it’s an approach to make the human-readable wikicode and information readable for machines as well. While you certainly understand the text “FlaSh was born on July 5, 1992”, a computer does not. For the computer it’s just a set of chars, without any relation between them. But if we now want to generate a list of “all players born in 1992” it will fail.
This is where SMW comes into play: We assign the property “Has birth day” to the page “Flash” with the value “5 July 1992”. Because the page “Flash” is also a member of the category “Players” we are now able to query for this piece of information. Now that’s all weird theory, how does it look in action? Somewhere in the wikitext of the page Flash you might find this line (actually not, it’s done via Template:Infobox player 2
):[[Has birth day:: 5 July 1992]]
If you store every player’s birthday in the SMW database, you can run a query like this to list all players born in 1992:
{{#ask: [[Category:Players]] [[Has birth day::> Jan 1 1992]] [[Has birth day::< Dec 31 1992]]
|?Has name
|?Has team
}}Explanation: {{#ask: }} is the general function for queries. Everything in [[brackets]] is a condition. And everything with “|?” is an additional property to be displayed.
We now got a list like this:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/vxp2sEZl.jpg)
If you are now wondering why Liquipedia needs this, read along:
SMW’s main benefit is the generation of lists which are being updated on their own like the
Premier Tournaments (everything except 2015 is entirely done via SMW). It’s especially useful for lists which need to be updated at a high rate, for example the results of daily/weekly cups: Leifeng Cup. But SMW can not only generate plain lists, we are also able to generate prettier things like all the medals statistics: Leifeng Cup.Another benefit are real-time statistics. We now are able to compute each match-up’s win-rate in a specific tournament or a specific map. You can see examples of this on
2014 DreamHack Open/Winter or Overgrowth.Another really awesome LP feature done via SMW is FO-nTTaX’s card viewer for LP-Hearthstone.
But to generate all those fancy lists, we need proper storage of all these information. Because it would be really a lot of work to do it in the way I explained above, we’re doing it in the templates. For Tournament data like location, server, patch, overall prize pool, map pool, etc it’s done in
Template:Infobox League. This also hides all the SMW stuff from the normal editor, (s)he has no need to worry about that.Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that seamlessly. Especially prize pool tables are problematic, because they’re almost always just static tables without any semantic storage. For this, I’ve ported Phil’s awesome templates from Hearthstone. We currently don’t really use the stored data, but expect some news about that soon™ :D
For that, we need to change all old prize pools to use the new templates (explanation:
Template:Prize pool start). Although this will take very long, it will reward Liquipedia: It’s the first step to create auto-updating results for player’s pages, something that’s usually forgotten/incomplete due to its complexity.If you're interested in SMW stats for Liquipedia (and other stats too), check out our WikiAPIary page.
Enough about SMW, time to talk about the game we’re (almost) all here for:
SC2/LickyPiddy
Although I’m just mediocre (top gold last season) in SC2, I love playing it. This and my desire to play in a teamleague made me found LickyPiddy, a casual SC2 clan out of the Liquipedia community. The only league we’ve participated in was the SC2Improve Teamleague Season 3. Because we all were mainly gold-dia, we played in the 3rd division. Unfortunately, we haven’t won a single game and finished last (our only “win” was a freewin^^), but it still was a hella lot of fun! I have only played one match in the whole season, but I casted almost all our matches, often with players like Androxide, dravernor or DARKING (thank you!!!). If you’re interested in seing the Liquipedia guys (and girl) getting crushed, have a look here (And yes, I know that I’m really a terrible caster ^^ ). I’m pretty sure that we’ll (try to) participate in the next season as well!
Promotion to trial-staff
In October I’ve reached probably my biggest milestone in Liquipedia: I got promoted to trial-staff! \Ü/
This gave me the amazing @ in front my IRC nick as well as access to the LP-Staff forums, which is nice.
Next steps:
Full staff -> rule Liquipedia -> rule the world
Shout-outs
Probably the most important and fun section:
Shout-out to all people who have edited Liquipedia! (This is also a call-out to those who haven’t yet
)Special shout-outs to everyone on IRC #liquipedia, especially:
Chapatiyaq (you’re a template hero!), salle[](for not banning me when I had crashed the job queue), Yhamm (for being a editing-machine), PhiLtheFish (SMW-wizard!), Androxide (sick caster, canon-rusher and a great editor), dravernor (funny Zim stories, also good caster and player), fusefuse (stories from Estonia), Ricci (for being a fast-learning editor with lots of passion for languages), prech (really, really sick BW-guy), Noam (staff and player), NovemberstOrm (staff and instant-stand-in player), Oddyesy (what a shrub
), shloub (nice guy, who also made a cool script) , (Don)Gecko[ne|VOD|OBS](where have you been lately?), Knatterking (sandwiches and soul-trains, yo), SuperHofmann (lots of #passion for Italian StarCraft 2), Josh_Video (great work on the results pages), pPingu(for being totally masters), Sjokola (improved a lot in SC2), Aeromi (dat sick knowledge), DARKING (great player and caster), hainrich (cool player) and a special special shout-out to FO-nTTaX for always helping me with my messed up templates! 
