This has been quite some time in the making, planning, and discussion stages. We're finally ready to both announce and launch the wiki, but I'll start from the beginning.

For Counter-Strike there has been two main esports wikis: KnifeRound and ClanWiki. Both wikis used Liquipedia as the base for their code and inspiration for structure. Both have a lot of information, some that overlaps, but a lot that doesn't. ClanWiki has had issues finding a bigger audience and KnifeRound has had issues with server stability, especially during big events or announcements.

In the reddit thread trying to get people to let us know a Liquipedia for CS:GO was something the community wanted, a user with the ID josemii posted “ClanWiki + KnifeRound = Liquipedia ?” I thought this was a nice dream goal, but again I'm jumping ahead.

About two months before that thread was posted I had reached out to KnifeRound founder Michael to try and see if there would be any interest from their side to bring their wiki over to Liquipedia, I knew of their server issues and also that their structure was pretty similar to ours. However after a few weeks of no communication I got a disheartening “No, we want to keep going at it alone.” as a reply.

On to Plan B, there was also the ClanWiki, a wiki founded and mainly run by two Swedish brothers, Erik and Martin. I contacted them first talking about them needing to show that Liquipedia content is licensed under CC BY-SA. We got talking and one thing lead to another, and they pretty quickly expressed interest in some kind of joint thing/merger/friendly takeover or what else to call it.

We were still in the planning stages when the news of Team Liquid signing a CS:GO team hit, and Liquipedia's twitter got poked by people asking if we were going to make a wiki for CS:GO. We replied teasing that sure if there's enough interest by the community to help make it we'll provide the wiki platform for them, and the reddit thread was made linking to the tweet, and we were flooded with messages.

So after this we heard some whispers from the KnifeRound admins and we sent out some feelers to the people we could get hold of, because Michael didn't reply, he was too busy and in a different time zone from me. However eventually Michael talked to Kas1, one of the bureaucrats over at Kniferound, and said we could merge the wikis.

So after a lot of back and forth here we are, ClanWiki + KnifeRound = http://wiki.teamliquid.net/counterstrike/

The scope of this wiki is not just CS:GO but, like ClanWiki, all of Counter-Strike — 1.6, Source, and Global Offensive — we will use the same sort of techniques we've used on SC2 wiki to use colours and sub pages to differentiate between game versions.

Sadly recently KnifeRound experienced some issues with their host and the wiki has been unavailable, this has made us go ahead with the launch while we’re still not as far along with the merge as we had hoped to be, so we do hope you have some oversight with the wiki not being super polished.

shen and gonace from ClanWiki; I don't think one can overstate the amount of work these two have put in over the years to their wiki.
And radhakr and kas1 from KnifeRound; they have been the de facto leaders for quite some time, as Michael has been too busy, as I understood it.

Here's what these two sites and their staff would like to say about the merge.

One thing we do take pretty seriously is using correct licenses and attributions for content contributed to our wikis, while also making sure people and organizations reusing our data does so in accordance with our license. In so doing the ClanWiki, KnifeRound and Liquipedia contributors and staff have contacted a host of organizations to attain the rights to use their images on our new wiki. And we’re happy to announce that MLG, 99Damage, HLTV.org, and CEVO have all agreed to let us use their images, for which we are very thankful. If you or your organization has media that you would like to let us use (with whatever license or restrictions you would like to impose) feel free to send us an email at liquipedia@teamliquid.net outlining this.

So we have (mostly) finished importing all the pages from both wikis, a process that has taken quite some time to do, since there’s a lot of overlap. This has left us having a lot of duplicate pages where we need to take two very similar articles currently on our wiki and turn them into one, using information and structure from both pages if needed to get the best possible end result.
This is where you come in, dear reader. We need your help, wikicode is very simple, it’s mostly regular text and the things that aren’t are fairly self explanatory or fairly easy to look up to see how they work. And if that fails we have a nice community IRC where you can ask questions and get help fairly quickly.
There’s an old proverb that goes “many hands make light work”, and this is even more so true when it comes to wikis. If every person who reads this announcement were to put in less than an hour to merge one article we’d be done within the first hour. However even just putting in five minutes to add a piece of information that is missing is great too. So remember this, if you have a little time to spare and you like using the wiki and want to see Counter-Strike have an awesome wiki, then please put some time into it, every little bit helps. Because whatever you do either no one else would have done it, so it’s a unique improvement, or if someone else would have done it they can then in turn do something else. Because the more people help out the higher quality a wiki has.

If you want to help out but don’t know what you can help out with, feel free to send me a PM and we can try to figure out in which areas it would suit you the best.


Lastly I just want to say a big thank you to all the ClanWiki and KnifeRound staff this far I’ve really enjoyed working with all of you, and of course the staff and contributors of Liquipedia who also have worked hard on this project. And now I’m looking forward to the really exciting future we all have ahead of us, with all the new people who hopefullydefinitely will be joining us.

/salle