Introduction

Over all the Liquipedia project has had a great year, it was a year of a lot of firsts. First year we actually worked with another wiki organization. We added two more wikis to the already big lineup of games we’re covering.

2015 already started promising, as we were looking into expanding into more games, especially Counter-Strike. At the same time, the guys from ClanWiki were looking for strong partners to improve their wiki. Gladly, we found each other and decided to unite our efforts to form the best Counter-Strike wiki possible. Soon after, KnifeRound also decided to join us with all their content and manpower, as they had already used shared templates and a structure similar to ours. While merging content of three wikis, we kept on setting up pages for ongoing and upcoming tournaments. On June 10 - after several months of hard work - we felt ready to release the wiki to the public.

In the meantime, we haven’t been sleeping on the other wikis either. 2015 marked our best year in terms of visitors and contributors to date. Especially The International 2015 has shattered all of our records. For the very first time, we have been able to surpass 20 million views in a single month! These views had been created by more than 2 million users, another milestone. Also, our mobile traffic has significantly increased and that even despite our - mildly put - suboptimal appearance on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets.

We’ve also continued another Liquipedia tradition in hosting bracket contests, last year in more successful than ever: 11 contests in 5 games with 1722 unique participants. While there have been some problems with prize delivery, we are looking to massively improve this in 2016 and expand to other games, such as Counter-Strike.

On another note, our community keeps growing as well, consisting of contributors from over 25 countries all around the world! Also, the Liquipedia community team LickyPiddy has once again participated in various seasons of SC2Improve Team League and is already signed up for S6, starting in January.

StarCraft: Brood War

The Stats

181 Contributors
20 076 Total edits (+ 17%)
2.9 Million pageviews (89% of the previous year)

Our numbers remain stable, which is remarkable for a 17-year old game. It clearly shows that many people still are very passionate about the game they love. With the resurrection of the Korean post-KeSPA scene and continuing foreign amateur events, we believe that we will be able to attract more visitors and, even more importantly, contributors in 2016. This is needed to continue to preserve the game’s history and legacy, because there still are important tournaments (e.g. lots of Proleagues) whose LP pages don’t contain a lot of information.

StarCraft II

The Stats

1304 Contributors
154 505 Total edits (+ 19%)
56 Million pageviews (66% of the previous year)

As you can see, our numbers for SC2 have heavily declined in the last year as viewer numbers have, too. We however certainly think they’ll rise again next year, with the first really big “Legacy of the Void” tournaments as well as the all-new World Championship Series. Another reason for less visitors on LP is how tournament formats have changed in the last year: There are no more huge open-bracket tournaments such as MLG where Liquipedia was basically the only updated source of results. These days, more drawn out tournaments with fewer matches per day are the norm, giving more exposure to single matches and storylines. One of your main goals this year is improving strategy articles to once again become the premier resource for builds.

Dota 2

The Stats

1 326 Contributors
107 286 Total edits (+ 80%)
95 Million pageviews (194% of the previous year)

As you can see, our Dota 2 wiki continues to grow, both in visitor and contributor numbers. Especially “The International” and the respective bracket contest has been a huge gateway for new contributors. It also has been the hatchery of several new features for Liquipedia, for example our lists of upcoming and ongoing professional matches. In the last months, many people have done quite a lot of back-end work to improve the way results and achievements work for both players and teams. We hope to continue this effort in 2016 to better document the Dota 2 esports scene and its participants. Additionally, we want to put a focus on player and team biographies, which are currently often lacking. If you want to help us in growing Liquipedia and Dota 2, this is a very good place to start and get involved.

Hearthstone

The Stats

505 Contributors
32 813 Total edits (+ 114%)
9.3 Million pageviews (156% of the previous year)

Hearthstone is a game that is growing very quickly and consequently its community as well. Consequently, new teams and leagues arise and consequently more work needs to be done. We are currently unable to keep up with the scenario, either in the competitive part was the casual part of the game (cards, expansions etc.). This is why we need you to help us! Liquipedia has always been about community and contributing, so creating and editing pages is the perfect way to say thank you. If you need any help for this, feel free to check out our IRC channel.

Smash

The Stats

175 Contributors
37 602 Total edits (+ 282%)
3.5 Million pageviews (356% of the previous year)

2015 has been a very interesting year for Smash in general and our wiki. Premier tournaments like http://wiki.teamliquid.net/smash/Apex_2015, http://wiki.teamliquid.net/smash/EVO_2015 and http://wiki.teamliquid.net/smash/The_Big_House_5 have had a very large amount of participants and high prizepools. Our visitor numbers have been very much dominated by these big events and had big spikes. Melee has been growing in 2015 but so did we. More contributors joined and helped updating tournament pages as well as added detailed game informations. As 2016 is already shaping up nicely for Smash Bros. with GENESIS 3, we hope to get more contributors on board for our planned expansion into other Smash titles such as the most recent version Sm4sh.

Heroes of the Storm

The Stats

311 Contributors
44 052 Total edits (+ 542%)
2.7 Million pageviews
Having only gone into and also left public beta earlier this year, Heroes of the Storm has already risen to be a respected esports title. Our wiki coverage has been a staple for many tournaments, we however still lack some in-game informations, such as battlegrounds and more advanced hero pages. Adding and improving that is our main goal for the next year, a project you can participate in. A very big thanks goes out to iakona13 and Hzhenyu007, who have been the leading forces for more than a year now.

Counter-Strike

The Stats

573 Contributors
189 781 Total edits (+ 250%)
14 Million pageviews
Right from the get-go, our Counter-Strike wiki has had a very successful year, already having 3rd most visitors of our wikis. While we mostly did “grunt" work by merging and adjusting pages to standards in the beginning, we’re now covering most leagues and have significantly improved other - non-esports - sections like skin and weapon pages. We’ve also converted a lot of tournament pages to use new templates for prize pools and rosters. This should help us reducing the work needed for updating results and achievement on player and team pages. Heading into 2016, we’re continuing to improve as many pages as possible while also covering more game information like maps.

Overwatch

The Stats

83 Contributors
5 823 Total edits
0.1 Million pageviews

Despite being still in closed beta, Overwatch has already had a few tournaments and we sincerely believe that Overwatch will grow to play an important role in the FPS scene. We’re ready to continue esports coverage once the beta resumes, but in the meantime, you can help us out by adding in-game informations about heroes, maps and playmodes.

Outlook on 2016

Liquipedia has always cared about copyrights and licensing - although we’ve sometimes needed a friendly reminder (thanks Tank!) - but in 2015, we’ve massively stepped up our efforts. Thanks to Shloub and his bot, we have been tagging all images without proper license information or licenses incompatible to ours. Many people have responded and added correct information. Sadly, we still had to delete quite a lot of photos. Because we’re still committed to giving content creators their well-deserved attribution, and not use images if we don’t have permission from the rights holder. We will soon be launching a new wiki called “Liquipedia Commons”, which will act as our central repository for images, graphics and logos. Together with an improved upload form, we hope to provide an easier way to manage and organize graphic esports content.

However, this is not the only project we’ve been working on for quite some time and hope to release in early 2016. Starting with FO-nTTaX wanting to unify our Brood War and other skins, we’ve sat down to discuss how Liquipedia should look like in the future. With changing habits these days, better support for mobile devices has been a top priority. Also, we wanted to highlight content as well as to streamline the user experience. We very early recognized that this couldn’t be done in our current skin, so we opted to completely restart on “white canvas” and create an all-new Liquipedia skin. In classic TL manner, these discussions have taken quite some time, but we’re close to releasing a public beta version! More details and how to participate in testing will follow soon™.
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Because we are committed to the values of Open Source and community participation as well as contribution, we have setup some GitHub repositories for a few of our software projects. If you want to improve it, feel free to send us a pull request

Finally, here are a few of our social media highlights of 2015:

Sometimes weird things can happen on social media:

Then this was posted on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/2sc1i0/let_liquipedia_know_if_youre_interested_in_a_csgo/
Our twitter feed kinda blew up then.

Speaking of reddit here’s another nice thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/2v525c/shoutout_to_liquipedia/

Thank you everybody, let’s make 2016 even better!