EPT
5 years ago today salle was officially made Head of Liquipedia following in the steps of Aesop who held that position before that.
Salle originally started out as a normal contributor as have most of us Liquipedia people. He was a big fan of MarineKing and his first contribution was to create a page for him (Yes, at some point Liquipedia had no MarineKing page, the page in the link looks a bit broken because the wiki has changed a lot since then).
And do you realize how long 5 years are? Liquipedia at this point only had StarCraft Broodwar and StarCraft II wikis, the Dota 2 wiki was already started, but only just a couple weeks before that. esports was still tiny compared to today, Na'Vi was one of the top contenders in Dota 2, Mvp was winning GSLs and IEMs, Broodwar was still played in KeSPAs Proleague. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was not even released yet. 5 years in esports are basically a generation in this fast moving industry. And for these last 5 years, salle has been in prime position to form the scene.
There are only a few websites that can claim to have the same reach in the esports scene. Reddit, teamliquid.net, hltv.org and a couple others are cumulating a lot of esports fans, but people from all these websites will regularly come to Liquipedia.
It is crazy to think that the wiki originally was meant as a Broodwar strategy resource and only that. 5 years ago no one foresaw just how big Liquipedia would become. But salle leads the staff and the contributors to build all the wikis we have now. At this point, Liquipedia consists of 9 main wikis, 4 public alpha wikis, 10 not quite public alpha wikis and a shared repository wikis. Originally just being a side-project of teamliquid.net, the wikis eventually outgrew the main website by quite a margin.
Since the editing of Liquipedia is in fact very anarchic, and keeping an overview over all of that might just be one of the biggest accomplishments, and salle does just that. Of course, he doesn't do it alone, but he still manages the big overview of it all.
5 years and going, and which better day would there be to say "thank you" and celebrate one of the silent people in the background, that keep esports running. So thank you salle, to another 5 years!
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