A history of Liquipedia

Preamble

A lot of people know the Liquipedia we have today. Covering 8 games at this point, it proves to be a great resource for all things esports, being imitated by other people and organizations countless times (Esportspedia, Gamepedia, etc…). Not too many people know how it all started though. How it was pronounced dead, how it only barely wasn’t closed down before it even saw the light of day, or how a few individuals time and time again set out to shape the community project we have today. As much of a community driven site Liquipedia is nowadays, as much it relied on key individual people to step up and start the projects that shaped the wikis into what they are.
I have read up on a lot of history of Liquipedia, as a lot of this can be found in staff forums, and I figured I might as well share it with the public as it may be interesting to some, how this project came along. Note that I myself only joined Liquipedia in early January 2013, so a lot of this I got over time from reconstructing things from the forums and talking to people that were involved.

An idea

The very first idea of a TL wiki comes around in May 2006. Whilst the idea sparks some interest, not much seems to have come from it.

Honest beginnings

Go mid-2007, the Team Liquid Progaming Database (TLPD) is developed and already in Beta, but the wiki idea is still in the heads of people. In November a wiki gets put up, although not on its own subdomain yet, but on the main teamliquid.net page as www.teamliquid.net/liquipedia_beta. The idea is not a publicly editable wiki, but a wiki that can only get update by staff and selected users that were given access. The idea to create a wiki-like sub-forum is tossed around, but in the end MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, Wikia, and a lot of other wiki projects is used from the start. To this day, Liquipedia is still running from this software, although it changed a lot over the years and we added a lot of customization to it. Nazgul is one of the first to actively state the opinion to open up editing of the wiki to the public, but he is outvoted.
The reach of the wiki is quite different from today. It is intended as a Brood War Strategy wiki, and initially only Strategy articles are added. This lays the foundation of Liquipedia being the go to resource for StarCraft Brood War strategy. Pages for players, teams, leagues and tournaments are not considered to be part of Liquipedia, but said to be more appropriate as content on the forums. However this is heavily discussed within staff and not quite finalized.
As people start exploring the possibilities of MediaWiki, more and more strategy articles are added. In March 2008 a post in the staff forums gets put up in search for a logo as people feel like they are in the final turns of finishing the wiki.
Pachi designs this logo, however it is only in the wiki for a very short time.

Xeofreestyler designs the first Liquipedia logo that will go live later, which is a globe, closely resembling Wikipedia’s logo, which can still be found as user icon of some of the very early Liquipedia staff members. As a side note: The first version of the Liquipedia logo had the common typo of "Liquidpedia" in there, this whole thing already started before the wiki even went live.

The wiki however unbeknownst to the early contributors from staff is far from being released. There are threads made to promote Liquipedia once it goes live, parts of which are actually used later on.

Downfall

Throughout 2008 staff and veteran TL users keep filling the wiki, but from week to week work gets slower. Communication in the team is lacking, people are waiting for other people to do stuff, and coordination within the team is missing. In November Plexa puts up a post outlining the problem and putting it up for discussion. Scrapping the whole project is discussed as a viable option, as well as just putting the very unfinished product out like it is or starting an actual core Liquipedia staff team from the people contributing to it so far. Putting the project to the trash is an opinion clearly favored by a lot of teamliquid.net staff members, and Plexa sends out PMs to key contributors to ask for their opinions.
Said key contributors however are in favor to actually create a Liquipedia forum and want to keep going with the project, and this is what happens. Another sidenote: A lot of these key contributors later on were either Liquipedia staff or went on to be staff in other sections on the site.

Getting going again

With the new Liquipedia forum, work speeds up again. With communication in the team on an all-time high, people are motivated and are actually pushing out multiple builds a day (the wiki is still primarily a strategy wiki). The first half of 2009 is the most active part of the pre-release phase with people challenging each other to put out content, discussing what to do and when to do said things. The early Liquipedia staff begins to shape from the most involved contributors like Aesop, cgrinker and GHOSTCLAW. With the StarCraft II Beta coming up, a StarCraft II Liquipedia is first discussed. In March it is decided to open up editing to the public at release, in the same month the domain wiki.teamliquid.net is chosen over alternatives like starcraftwiki.net.

The release

June 5th marks the release of Liquipedia. It was finally ready, the wiki is opened up to the public. After more than two years of working on something that the contributors were not even sure would ever be released, they finally saw their work published. For the first months of Liquipedia being live Plexa is the head of Liquipedia.
The following month is a grind. The wiki expands very quickly, from about 300 pages at release to over 700 pages three weeks later. The Liquipedia staff consists of only 4 people at this point (Aesop who is the head of Liquipedia starting October 2009, cgrinker, GHOSTCLAW, and mikeymoo). The wiki starts to expand into articles about pro gamers, teams, and tournaments. The wiki is more and more becoming a general StarCraft resource. In order to get quality content Liquipedia hosts Q & A shows with pro gamers and personalities like NonY and Day[9], which gather quite some interest from the community.
The "Why Haven't You Edited Liquipedia Yet?" post in the Brood War strategy forum on teamliquid.net proves to be a success to flesh out the strategy section on the Brood War wiki.

A new game emerges

With the StarCraft II beta starting in early 2010, there is also work happening regarding a Liquipedia for the new game. Work had begun even before the beta started, and the StarCraft II wiki is released on 8th March 2010. With the StarCraft Brood War wiki on track and the new wiki, not only the size of the wiki gets bigger and bigger, but also the number of staffers. Interestingly the new wiki benefits a lot from the work that was done on the Brood War wiki, as a lot of the things can carry over without much change, this is soon to change and it starts to go the other way round. As the StarCraft II wiki takes off, new code is developed for the new wiki first and later ported back to the Brood War wiki. A trend that we have later seen with other new wikis again and again. As new wikis bring in new people, these new people usually also bring new ideas. With the new wiki also came the first version of the splash page that is directly at wiki.teamliquid.net. It features the two logos of the wikis as well as a search field.

A new look

Since the release of the StarCraft II wiki, the wiki had a similar skin to the Brood War wiki. It had different colors and a "futuristic" background image, but the base was the same. In February 2011 things change though. The StarCraft II wiki is getting a whole new look and feel. The Brood War wiki however remains with the original skin, keeping the original look and feel. The new skin for the StarCraft II wiki later on gets many siblings with different colors that run on the later wiki additions.

The race

Whilst Liquipedia is a great resource already, it tends to prove its value most during big events. By August 2011, who gets their edit in first for the results of live games has turned into a race. Staff hardly participates in this race anymore, instead most of this is done by regular users (blahz0r was most often the winner). For MLG Anaheim in 2011, each of the tournaments pages gets over 250.000 views in a single weekend. By now Liquipedia is more successful than anyone had ever dreamed off before it was released. Tournament organizers, pro gamers, community sites and fans alike link to Liquipedia when any StarCraft related question pops up.

Coins

In early March 2011 teamliquid.net sees the first release of Liquipedia Coins. In an attempt to make wiki contributions more visible, every contributor gets coins at the bottom right of their forum posts that show the amount of work they put into the wiki. Whilst the first couple levels are easy to achieve, the later coin levels require a lot of work to be done. The exact formula will change slightly over the years (with one slightly more significant change with the launch of LiquidDota’s gold store), but the idea always remains the same: Do stuff on Liquipedia, earn coins. The concept is highly appreciated within the wiki contributors group, and soon people try to create Top-X lists of top contributors (and people also started to beg staff to get gold coins from pretty much day one).

Bracket Contests

A new tradition was started in March 2011. With the Team Liquid’s own TSL 3 tournament (the first one in SC2) around the corner, Liquipedia staff are asked by other TL staff if they could host a bracket contest. The contest goes so well* (over 3000 participants) that it is decided to do it again at later times. Since participants have to fill the bracket as a wiki template, people get to see how the internals of the wikis look like. Several new staff members and other really important contributors began their editing career with this bracket contest.
(*The servers did crash for two hours when the first results were to go live… we still blame salle to this day).

Going international

With the wiki expanding, different ways to grow the wikis are being explored. One of them: Internationalized articles. The two wikis are not English only anymore, but instead a lot of pages are translated into different languages. Unfortunately the wikis can’t attract enough people to maintain it. The project eventually gets stopped, and the internationalized pages are removed.

New brackets

In September 2011, the bracket templates were redone. One of the most important template families on the wiki was completely swapped out. Liquipedia had completely relied on Wikipedia's bracket templates until that point which was constructed of tables where three rows were spanned to make a single cell, so if something went to two lines inside the cell the whole bracket broke in very unexpected and horrible ways, but from there on had its own brackets. To this day our bracket templates are the most copied templates on other esport wikis. These new bracket templates not only looked better than the old ones, the also brought new functionality. The bracket popups that are standard on Liquipedia nowadays were introduced together with these new brackets and replaced the old match-lists below the brackets.

A forum for Liquipedia

With the Liquipedia project growing bigger, talk pages prove to not be good enough for cross wiki developments. A Liquipedia Contributors Forum is started, giving every contributor with at least a silver coin access to a discussion platform regarding the wiki. The new forum is primarily used to get to know each other, help each other with a simple questions simple answers thread, bounce ideas for how to update or make completely new templates, and to coordinate cross wiki standards. It is also used to discuss the future of the project, like which wikis to expand to. Over the years great things start in the contributors forum, including major template overhauls like the cross table templates, the mobile adaption of a lot of templates or various bigger updating projects. Liquipedia movie nights and other community events like a team playing in StarCraft II team leagues starts here as well.

Expanding again

With the Brood War wiki and the StarCraft II wiki well on track, the contributors explore adding new wikis. Two new wikis were set up around May 2012, but with time constraints being in place only one of them ever sees the light of day. On August 29th, Liquipedia launches its third wiki, the Dota 2 Liquipedia. From the start the wiki is in heavy competition. Multiple Dota 2 wikis already exist. For a long time, the Dota 2 wiki struggles with updates, but over time it is getting better and better. Eventually the Dota 2 wiki gets to a similar state as the StarCraft II wiki over the years, but a lot of work is put into it in order to not have to close it down. As much as the Dota 2 wiki is a success, the League of Legends wiki which was put on the shelf until the Dota 2 wiki was launched is not taken off the shelf since there’s already an esports oriented LoL wiki.

New leadership

As Aesop, the head of Liquipedia, is more and more busy with real life obligations, it becomes clear that he is not able to lead the project to the extend necessarily to grow the project and bring it forward. In June 2012, a new head of Liquipedia is assigned and salle takes over the lead of the project. Being the most active staffer at the time, he is the logical choice to take over. His first project is to finish the Dota 2 wiki that is already well underway at the time he takes over the project lead. Aesop who lead the project for close to three years still occasionally drops by to this day.

Forming brand identity

By May 2012, Liquipedia still has the Wikipedia inspired globe logo. It becomes clear that Liquipedia needs more of its own brand, an initiative is started to get a distinct logo for Liquipedia. Until the new logo is launched in November of the same year, tens if not over a hundred versions of different logos are created. The idea of the puzzle piece is first mentioned by the new head of Liquipedia and the final design of the puzzle piece is done by fusefuse. In August the new logo launches and has been the Liquipedia logo ever since. Other ideas for the logo that were not chosen include a puzzle-Team Liquid logo, orange horse puzzle pieces and a puzzle piece cube with StarCraft logos.

Restructuring staff

Early 2013 holds news for the Liquipedia staff. For the first time in the history of the Liquipedia project, the staffers have actual administrator rights on the wikis. Before that, staff was technically only users that was privileged in discussion with access to the staff forums, now they actually can do maintenance work like deleting pages.

Mobile internet

Throughout 2013, the mobile skin that is on the wiki until 2016* is first put up on the wiki. In the beginning a lot of stuff does not work, but eventually the bugs are ironed out. The wiki still looks very rough on mobile though, a lot of the core templates like tabs, info boxes and brackets are not even remotely mobile ready. It is a start though, and over the following two years a lot of these templates were one by one made mobile ready.
(*TBA )

New wikis

At the end of 2013 the Liquipedia community looked into starting new wikis again. A Hearthstone wiki is set up in October 2013, the Heroes of the Storm wiki just a month later. By the time the Hearthstone wiki launches on May 31st 2014, a Smash wiki has been started as well. The Smash wiki launches on June 19th 2014, the Heroes of the Storm wiki finally launches on November 6th 2014. All three wikis struggle to find contributors in the early days, but especially Heroes of the Storm and the Smash wiki take off after a while. New contributors come in and templates that were written for these new wikis later gets ported back to the Brood War, StarCraft II and Dota 2 wikis. The majority of the year is spent to get the three wikis running, getting contributors for them and testing new ideas on the new wikis.

Color blind mode

With realizing that the wikis are pretty hard to read for color blind people, a user script is developed by Chapatiyaq to allow color blind people to properly discern the color coded things on the wiki. Especially color coding the played races in the StarCraft brackets is important there, as the colors for Protoss (green) and Random (yellow) are very hard to distinguish.

Semantic MediaWiki

With the new wikis also comes new technology, and Liquipedia starts to adopt the Semantic MediaWiki extension on the wiki. This new extension allows to use parts of Liquipedia as a database, and especially the esports parts of the wikis profit a lot from this new development. It is now possible to query stuff like total earnings or map statistics directly from the wiki pages, without the need of external software. A number of talented coders takes it upon themselves to rewrite a good number of templates using this new technology, allowing to create templates that make editing for the contributors even easier. Especially the Hearthstone wiki gets a fairly complete setup of SMW as a very new wiki that isn’t too big but a lot of interesting new uses were explored for it.

A new look… again

As more and more wikis are added, the Brood War wiki with the older skin looks more and more out of place compared to the newer wikis that all just share different color versions of the same skin. With this in mind and emerging problems on porting templates between the wikis, a new skin project is started in October 2014. Originally only intended to be a merger between the skins, it becomes clear pretty fast, that a complete rewrite of the design is the way to go. A lot of mockups are made with varying degrees of outside-the-box thinking, which eventually lead to a very different layout. At the time of writing this new skin is still in beta, but can already be tested on the wikis (log in and check your settings).

Another management shift

By January 2015, the whole project had become so big, a single head of Liquipedia was not enough anymore. The two biggest wikis (StarCraft II and Dota 2) get their own heads in Chapatiyaq and Tephus in order to allow salle to concentrate his efforts more on the smaller and especially developing wikis.

A wiki for the files

With the wiki getting bigger and bigger, and a lot of files that are used on multiple wikis, the idea of a file wiki is first discussed in February 2015. Descending from the Wikimedia Commons project which is part of Wikipedia, a similar approach is taken by the Liquipedia project. After lots of testing and delays due to the Counter-Strike wiki, the file wiki goes live a year later in February 2016. The whole of over 30000 files gets moved in a concentrated effort over the course of a month, largely without affecting the running wikis. The whole Liquipedia Commons project is a showcase of the bigger and bigger usage of wiki bots on the Liquipedia wikis, which has grown over the 2014 and 2015.

Going new ways

Also starting in February 2015 is the work on the Counter-Strike Liquipedia. Partnering with two already existing Counter-Strike wikis first with clanwiki.nu and later also with kniferound.net. Liquipedia initially is a merge between these two wikis. This is a first for Liquipedia, as it is the first time that a Liquipedia wiki is not started from scratch. With the combined effort of the contributors of all three wikis, the merge is mostly done by the release at June 11th 2015. It proves to be relatively easy as the two wikis are largely based on the Liquipedia format, which by this time is also adapted by wikis in other games like Esportspedia and Gamepedia (which have their own very interesting intertwined history). The Counter-Strike wiki quickly grows into one of the larger wikis of the Liquipedia project, gathering most edits per month of all of the wikis.

Watching for new games

The eighth game wiki in the Liquipedia project is started in October 2015 in form of an Overwatch wiki. The new Blizzard title still being in alpha, the wiki is started very early. With not too much information available yet, the wiki sees a fast release on November 14th in the same year, being updated with all the tournaments from the start.

A view in the future

Adding new wikis is being discussed again. No one knows yet which wikis Liquipedia might add in the future, but the discussion on which games the contributors want to add is always ongoing. The new skin is as mentioned before still being worked on, to replace the old skins that just are not as good for mobile as we would want them to be. There are a lot of ideas about new things to add to the wikis that are not quite ready to be announced yet. There is always stuff to do, and there are more people doing stuff right now than ever before. That does not mean that Liquipedia couldn’t use even more people though. The more people help out, the better the content will be, more awesome features, etc..

Liquipedia in numbers

By the time of this writing, Liquipedia has amassed quite a lot of history and part of this history can fairly easily be measured.
Since the start the Liquipedia contributors created over 33 000 articles, used over 31 000 images, more than 25 000 people contributed to the wikis doing only a couple thousand shy of two million edits (1 969 198).
In the last 30 days alone 40 000 edits were made, so that the two millionth edit should happen within the next 4 weeks.
43 people made full wiki staff since the start, six of which made red name status and eight of which made blue name status on teamliquid.net. The only bigger staff group within teamliquid.net is the Writers section. The full list of all Liquipedia staff can be found on the wiki here.
The Liquipedia IRC chat goes by hundreds of lines every day and has proven to be an irreplaceable resource for communication around the Liquipedia wikis.

Conclusion

The whole idea of an esports wiki will be 10 years old this coming May. No one could have foreseen the growth and the success that Liquipedia has had. These 10 years have seen both ups and downs, have seen the contributors growing beyond themselves, but also has seen the project close to being shut down. The Liquipedia story is a success in the eyes of a lot of people, but it is a success that only happened thanks to the hard work of hundreds of dedicated people. If not for new people time and time again coming in with new and fresh ideas and evolving the wiki to be even greater, and from older contributors keeping up the mostly thankless work of updating results and patch changes the Liquipedia we know today would not have come to be.
This post is not only to record the history of the Liquipedia project, but also to give thanks and praise all of the people that have put in countless hours of work into making it happen, this post is to document that great things happen from hard work and dedication, and this post is to make sure it is not forgotten where Liquipedia came from and how it got to where it is.
Lots of people do not realize the amount of work that has gone in to make Liquipedia what it is today, and that is a shame. I hope this posts will shed some light on the awesome people that made all of this happen.

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Writer, CSS: FO-nTTaX
Banner Gfx, Editor and fact checking: salle