EPTWhy would I want to work on Liquipedia?
Liquipedia is one of the hugest projects within the Brood War communtiy and one of the reasons why I visited TL more frequently after it was released. But that might be just me.
Liquipedia offers a lot of potential to either cover recent events, especially those that are posted in large threads every week, or, which in my eyes is way more important, might attract new players to the scene. It shows that we are not dead, still care and might give them a good introduction. Every little guide you publish in the forums could drown under a stockpile of Pro League coverage, Flash Memes, Interviews, while an article in LP is easier to find. LP is still one of the easiest portals to read, to understand and to help out with difficult problems.
Again it could really help to find strategies, even without knowing TL.net at all. I have been told by the wise ones (Noam), that the Google search engine is more likely to find articles written on Liquipedia.
If you're a retarded nostalgia driven maniac like I am, you also might want to actually start to gather all our foreign and Korean heritage and pass it on to people that might be interested to learn how deep Brood War's roots actually are. Besides, it looks a lot as if there was almost no Foreign scene at the moment - which isn't true at all. It's kind of sad that our biggest achievements as a scene might fade over time, with only Korean history remaining. Please share your knowledge!
Besides, Liquipedia II has info about a game only two years old but has twice the number of articles. How would we let that happen? Let's show them!
Requirements
You should be somewhat fluent in English, although that is really not an issue. Currently a lot of articles are in the need to be updated rather than spell checked. There is also no reason to worry about pressing buttons that might destroy the universe and delete the internet, as LP has plenty of back ups. Nobody will kill you if you try, as a matter of fact, the worst thing that could happen is that they'll help out and inform you how to do better next time.
What is needed?
Pretty much everything. Strategies seem to be outdated mostly, or at least not complete enough.
Player's profiles, especially those of the active foreigners need more love. If you have something in mind you think is missing - just go for it. Do it.
Foreign history is another topic - there are still a lot of players that miss, not to mention some of the biggest events.
Korean leagues and pages are also anything but complete, especially when it comes to less known players and older leagues, while the most recent ones seem to be covered.
Well, just have a look at some of these here:
- Foreign Leagues (History) - work in progress
- Foreign Players (active)
- Foreign Players (retired)
- Strategy Overview - nothing added since... ?
- Beginner's Portal - work in progress
- Foreign Portal - work in progress
Guide: Liquipedia Editing
Editing is really easy and you do not need to worry that you might not understand things. But first: log in on the Liquipedia before you start. You can't do much more than read-only if you are not logged in.
See? The first step was really easy!
Option 1: I only want to correct existing articles
Many of the articles I added have still dozens of mistakes - my English isn't all that great. Not to mention that VODs are missing, player profiles might lack info that you know, but we didn't when we first created the pages.
Now, there are two possible ways to contribute without doing too much work: use the Talk pages or do minor edits yourself.
Talk Pages
Talk pages are for dicussions. You can access all of them. They are located on the top of the articles. Just write what you want to have changed, and hopefully someone will do it for you. You don't even need to use much "code" to do something like this.
Two things though:
- Add ~~~~ at the end of your message; this will leave your signature, so we know who you are
- To respond to an already existing comment type a ":" (without the "). Your text will be indented
Minor Edits
Most of the things you might want to change is text editing only I guess. As long as you really only change text, you don't need to know what the wiki code really does to the rest of the article. You can basically fix any typos.
Note: if you only change typos or really small mistakes check the "Minor Edit" Box before you save!
Option 2: I want to do bigger edits!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ErTWy.png)
Right, that's the best way to contribute, become one of us! The code you need to understand isn't all that complicated, if you understand the forum BB-Code, you're good to go. Again, it is really, really easy.
Most of it is actually that easy, that I'm not going to explain it. Trolol. Text design, structure and so on are perfectly well explained in the Help pages, I recommend to skim through them to get an idea of what you're doing. After 15 minutes of reading you will know the basic commands and formats, after actually editing pages for longer than an hour you will know them by heart.
If information misses in Liquipedia I's help pages, you will find in Liquipedia II's pages.
Also:
Help:PoliciesHelp:Policy/Player pages (Foreign)Please read those carefully before editing / adding more foreign players!
First Steps
User Pages
If you're really unsure where to start and are a generally shy person, you can also do Sandbox edits on your user page. To access your user page, simply add "User:YourNick" at the end of the URL in your browser. You can't possibly do any damage there!
Example: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/User:Ninazerg
Be sure that you type in the URLs correctly, all articles are case sensitive. As a result, a page will appear to be blank once you misstyped it.
Example: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/User:NinaZerg
Also, [ and ] won't work with nicks. Use ( and ) instead!
Update: It's way easier to get to your page by simply clicking on your nick when you're logged in. Thanks Pholon for pointing out the obvious.
Copy&Paste
Special Wiki Code might appear harder to edit for you at first. Especially tables can be problematic, if you don't understand the concept. It doesn't matter what kind of thing you want to add - if it isn't covered in the Help pages (see above) you don't need to give up immediately.
Simply look at the source of a page that uses a different or the same thing you want to have and copy the information out and change it bit by bit until it looks ok to you. That concept is very nice for your first edits. Use the preview button instead of saving and editing all the time!
If you still encounter problems all over again, you can join Liquipedia's IRC Channel on Q-Net: #Liquipedia. In case you do not have any kind of IRC client, just use TL.net's web IRC. Those people are eager to help you out and are very, very wise.
General Page Designs/Conventions
Most pages have specific designs. Player Profiles for example always look the same: General Info, Trivia Knowledge, Accomplishments, Interviews, Notable Games. The same goes for tournaments or strategies. If you only skim over some of these pages you will soon realize how a page could/should look like. Just use the copy&paste method and edit those bit by bit if you are about to create a new page from scratch.
But: check the Templates paragraph!
Templates
There are dozens of templates that will help you out and make life a lot easier for you. Templates always start with {{ and end with }}. Everything in between is usually self explanatory. The only problem is to know which templates you might need. But do not worry, here is a list of the most common ones! (case sensitive again, so be careful to copy/type them correctly!)
- {{Col}}: Starts a Column
- {{col-break}}: marks where the column should break; can be used multiple times
- {{EndCol}}: Closes the Column; if your text looks akwardly shifted, this is prolly missing
- Tournament Grids: can be found in Liquipedia II Help pages, along with different info
- Player Profile Infobox: Template
- Player Profile Infobox (Retired): Template
- League/Tournament Infobox: Template
To use such a template, simply go to the specific page (see links). Some of those templates are already displayed and offer code you can copy directly; for others you might need to click on the edit tab and copy the source directly. Anyhow, it's still pretty easy this far, right?
Some templates, sometimes embed in other templates, sometimes part of pages you just copied (Copy&Paste Method) use automatic categories. If you for example create a player page for a retired player, double check that you added him to the Retired Player category - using the retired player box instead of the active player box!
References
Some things need to have a source to it. In my opinion the
Selector page shows this quite nicely; if it wasn't for us having tons and tons of proofs about him hacking, and hacking and hacking, I couldn't have written that he is a notorious hacker. Sometimes you also want to add clearifications to builds, link to VODs or Interviews that are otherwise not really fitting to the current paragraph. For this you can use references. Those require a little HTML-like tag, but it's not hard. Let's do an example. This is what we want:
Player A was replaced by Player B after Incident C.²
Ideally, the ² should now be blue and link to a foot note - our reference. To actually add the reference, add <ref name=Source>[url Description]</ref>
Player A was replaced by Player B after Incident C<ref name=Source>[www.google.com Google.com on the issue]</ref>
Now, the <ref> tags are just needed to define that here should be a foot note. The "Source" can be replaced with any word you want to add, even it was PenisPenisVulva. In between the ref-tags we have an ordinary link. It does not need to be a link, but you'll mostly want the link version, due to using that as source rather than as "only foot note".
+ Show Spoiler +
fwiw "PenisPenisVulva" will probably get you banned...
-> just use something that makes sense.
However, these tags are not enough. If you only type it like this you will get annoying red warnings. You will also need something like:
==References==
<references />
This is an anker for the actual foot notes, as they show as number in the text, but as fully written sentence (or link). We usually add this at the bottom of the article!
Guide: Adding older Events
Now for something completely different. I personally would like to see more of the older events being part of Liquipedia, there are still hundreds of them missing. I know that there were really active scenes in other countries than Germany, but I know shit about them. You could be the person to teach me - with editing Liquipedia!
When I use the word "old" I really mean articles from before 2010, maybe from the era in between 1998 - 2003. However, the older these events are, the less sources you will find. It does really help to remember them, but that's hardly enough to re-construct grids or to create a full article.
This brings me to the next point: it is not needed to remember everything and it certainly doesn't matter if you play since 2010 but want to help with this kind of stuff. Anybody can do research, as long as there is motivation.
Option 1: I know what I want to add
It is a huge help if you know what you want to add. Let's assume you know already. But where to get information? If it's not in Liquipedia (foreign events that is), than it's probably not in TLPD.
There are plenty of sources you can use. Here are those I usually use:
- TL.net Site Search
- Gosu Gamers.net News Archive
- GG.net Ranking (in case I have no idea who a player is)
- GG.net Event List
- Meet Your Makers Coverage
- Broodwar.de Coverage Archive
- Broodwar.de News Archive
- Reps.ru
So, note that some of these pages are in a foreign language, you most likely do not understand. That's not that bad, because most times you will find all neccessary info on TL or GG.net anyhow; grids, player information, VODs and so on are a different thing. Many events were hosted on pages that are nowadays offline (e.g. PGTour, WGTour, SC4all, GameOutLoud.com), but used to advertise their events on TL directly, with their main coverage and all information being posted on their respective pages. Which you can not access anymore.
To get more information use the pages I listed above and type down good key words, such as "PGL" and try to filter by year. You will often find grids, replays or scores hidden in a wall of what looks like jibber jabber to you.
You can also do external search requests, by using google. Go to google, type "Site:URL Keyword" into the engine and hit enter; you get more results than you think, most of them are actually very helpful. You can also refine the search if you exclude certain phrases. If you search for a "Invitational" tournament for example, you will get dozens of hits that won't fit; if you search for a old Russian invitational with
" site: reps.ru Invitational Brood War"
(Please note that there is no space between site: and reps; if I don't add the space there i get a puking smiley)
you will see a lot of hits on the latest ISL. That's not what you want though, so exclude "-Starleague" and filter using players that played!
"site:reps.ru Invitational ret DinOt brat_ok IefNaij -international"
It is kind of difficult to find all the information, but with a bit of luck you get all info you need. In many cases you need to literally re-construct tournament grids or group phases, since you might only know the initial player list and results for the later stages (semi finale and onwards) of a tournament. With the help of replays (can usually be found on gg.net) and minor helps you can do a lot more than you think.
If you know winner, runner-up and the other semi finalists in addition to the original player list you can start to add first the winner and the loser, then the semi finals and so on, until you get to the starting rounds. I did this in many cases, mostly for WCG tournaments, when you only knew who the winner and the second played in the rounds before. Add as much information as possible; use W and L for Win / Lose in tournament grids instead of the acutal results - it helps!
Sometimes, rarely though, you can read topics that link to sources that are now offline, but that are still archived somewhere. For this try to copy the links and search for them in Archive.org.
Note: this page demands a lot of patience from you, it doesn't load to quickly and often refuses queries. Try again and again, until you know for sure.
Option 2: I don't know what I want to add
Ok, there is still room enough for that. It's hard to remembe "all the events". I have problems myself.
You can get inspiration by browsing the list of Option 2, simply randomly clicking through pages, until you stumbe upon something that seems worth it. That's kind of... strange though.
Another approach would be to click through the player's profiles - many of them have a lot of accomplishments listed that are still not in Liquipedia. If you find something that sounds interesting - go for it!
Update 2:
On June 16 2012 06:01 Aesop wrote:
What I used to do to find pages to edit was hitting random page until I found something to fix or improve upon. This could be basic infos on a player's career, a map, notable games someone played, spelling or clarification in strategy articles. All that doesn't require writing an article on your own.
What I used to do to find pages to edit was hitting random page until I found something to fix or improve upon. This could be basic infos on a player's career, a map, notable games someone played, spelling or clarification in strategy articles. All that doesn't require writing an article on your own.
Also: Liquipedia will tell you!
So, now go forth an edit!
If there are updates, questions or any other feedback, I'd update the OP. Thanks to Nina & Noam for helping and spell checking!
(one of my biggest mistakes)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WIlEu.png)
