As an outsider looking in, editing Liquipedia can sometimes be scary, or intimidating. All those templates and all those different types of brackets could well confuse you if you're new to coding in general. They sure as hell confused me, which put me off ever changing anything for a while. I just appreciated how brilliant a tool Liquipedia was, but I never thought about ever being one of the people making it a brilliant tool.

But one day, that changed. I wanted to contribute to the StarCraft 2 scene. I wanted to make a difference, to the game I loved, even if it was only a small difference, I wanted to contribute. So, one fateful DreamHack Valencia 2012, I updated a result. And that was it, I was hooked on editing. I began craving that feeling of “I contributed, I helped.” It felt good knowing that what I was doing was helping my passion. Not all of us can afford to spend money to help their favourite teams in StarCraft 2 or Dota 2. What I could do was update those teams' pages, and the player pages. I could make sure that when TaeJa wanted to know who he would be playing in the next round of DreamHack Summer 2012, the first place he would go would be Liquipedia, to check out the results I updated. I loved seeing my coins go up, and whenever I saw a player at a big tournament look at a page I'd worked on, I'd feel a rush go through my body.



So to you budding editors who aren't quite sure when and what they should be doing, and get put off as a result of it, I say: Don't leave. The Liquipedia community as a whole loves seeing someone new come in and start contributing. If you don't know how to contribute, please come to our IRC channel and ask! We probably won't bite! The sense of accomplishment you get from having just created a page for player, personality, patch, or tournament is incredible. And perhaps, more importantly than anything, you get some pretty sick coins to show off to the rest of TeamLiquid.

While updating Liquipedia might be seen as trying to chop down a tree with a herring, there’s still hundreds of people doing it each month and we keep building on to the wikis. So awhile ago I asked the Liquipedia Contributors in our forum what reasons they had for contributing. What their motivations were. You've just heard from Kollin what his reasons were but there are many different reasons we contribute. Here's five of the main reasons:

1 Giving Back

“I just love the Team Liquid community and I wanted to contribute something, and in Liquipedia I found a way I could do that without needing any specialist knowledge or training or needing to commit specific time.”

We humans are social animals. We live in groups. We're also mammals and we care for our offspring, and as such nature has provided us with altruism. Doing something for others feels good. This is an immediate reward.

However giving back isn't just an altruistic thing. All around us in the Team Liquid community we see many people contributing in cool ways to better the community, and this can make us feel a sense of debt, wishing there was something that we could do that would also be useful to someone. And Liquipedia is a great way to give back to the community, not just the Team Liquid community, but the StarCraft—and more recently the Dota 2—communities at large.

2 Fixing Errors

“I started out just wanting to correct small mistakes that I came across, no intention of doing something big. Just helping with the little and obvious things I could do at the time.”

There's so many submissions made to the wiki that occasionally an error pops up—some grammar errors, type errors, and the like—that if you wanted to you could spend all day every day just going over every page to find and remove all of these. And for many of us that is something we did in the beginning before we got invested into the wiki. It's a simple edit: read a page, see an error, log in, find the error in the edit window, correct it, preview and save. Well for some of us it's more about things being “RIGHT!” than wanting to help the community.

3 Preservation

“I have been editing BW content because the game had a very important role in my life, and I feel that contributing to Liquipedia is a way to make BW live forever.”

“I think I started editing because I felt some kind of obligation to preserve history, as it were, especially with the first few steps of SC2. I felt that our new beginning needed to be documented properly for future generations.”

The StarCraft and Dota 2 esports communities are niché communities, whether we like to admit it or not. If we want this part of our lives to be preserved who better to do it than you and I?

4 The Other Contributors

“After all of that I joined the Liquipedia community on irc, I found it awesome, saw that a ton of people were doing everything possible to improve the wiki and so I wanted to help [...]”

“Then, I was able to actually talk to people from TL through IRC. Eventually, just the fact that I was no longer a nobody made me keep on editing.”

This is also part of the social aspect of us humans, we like to belong to groups we respect and we respect people and groups who like what we like. Getting help from the more experienced editors, getting to know new people who are fun and quirky, taking part in one of the Liquipedia Contributors Movie or Gaming nights (never forget the clipboards!) is also part of what makes us wanting to contribute.

5 Recognition for Contributions / Coins

“One day, I noticed that my beer-drinking emoticon in my signature on the forums disappeared, replaced by a coin. When hovering over the coin, the alt text said that it was for 'Liquipedia Contribution.' As I kept editing, this coin began to reproduce asexually, and even change color.”

Besides the coins—which is a pretty good way of showing how much someone has contributed—the shout outs from casters, seeing players using a resource you've helped build, it matters. It feels really awesome. This is more an intermediary benefit though, but it keeps on giving. Whenever people compliment Liquipedia for being updated as soon as games are done, or having tonnes of information, even if you haven't made an edit in a while, you still helped build it and those things makes you feel happy. We also can't forget the Liquichievements that contributors of Liquipedia give to each other in recognition for good work.

We frantically look for things to improve upon on Liquipedia and templates constitute no exception. The infobox for player pages was one of these things we wanted to revise for a long time. But like it is with most projects, some things need to be left alone for awhile and come back to later. We had discussed a good many ideas over the course of the last couple of months and finally they came into existence.
So, What Changed?
We re-structured, scrapped, changed, and added new features to the infobox. To give you a quick overview, this is Mvp's old and new infoboxes.

The Big Picture

The first thing you might notice is, that that the picture now covers the entire width of the infobox. This leads to a cleaner, more modern look. And who doesn't like to look at progamers?

New Structure

We also restructured the player information. First you will find his/hers personal information and background. Real name—in the native spelling and then if needed, romanized name—birthday, and home country. Then you have the player information: race, team, individual sponsorship, and alternate IDs. You may also noticed the removal of the nickname column. We did not like the way it was used, as it lead, in most cases, to a collection of random nicknames a caster used once or twice, instead a list of widely accepted and notable nicknames for a player (an good example is God/Ultimate Weapon for Flash. This led to the cluttering of the infobox and therefore less useful. Alternatively, we encourage you to add these well-known nicknames to a players trivia section (preferably well-cited).

Stalk In Style

The old infobox had limited functionality to display relevant links. We only had a handful of sites to link to, and many things had to be done manually. Also, the links were text only and were taking a significant portion of the infobox page, where it really isn't necessary. The solution to having more sites to link to, taking up less space, and making it easier to edit in, was actually pretty simple: Why not use icons? So DivinO made these wonderful icons that we can use to link to all relevant sites.

That way we can finally stalk a players complete online profile and always find the information we are looking for.

Achievements

Before we had the “Crowning Achievement” section in the infobox. The idea was to highlight a players most important, career wise, achievement. Whether it was their breakout performance or finally that first place they've been working towards for so long. The problem with this was, that’s really hard to actually decide. Which was more important for MarineKing's career? His 2nd place in his breakout tournament 2010 Sony Ericsson Starcraft II Open Season 2, or was it his long awaited first place in a Premier Tournament at the 2012 MLG Pro Circuit/Winter/Arena? We decided to cut this feature and replace it with a showcase of a players premier tournament wins and other notable achievements (like MVP awards or all-kills in team leagues). This way it is always clear what to link there and it is obvious in one glance what the player has achieved.

So since last time we’ve added two new members to our staff, Miwi and ChapatiyaqPTSM. They’ve done some really great work and are very helpful so I’m really glad we have brought them onto the team.
Miwi has been doing brackets for us for a long time (that is, more than a year) and he’s been on board and helped us with our Liquipedia for Dota 2 too. Making some new templates for it.
Chapatiyaq has been contributing for a long time too. The coolest thing he’s done, in my humble opinion, is a system to help contributors fill out brackets either before an event has started or after a whole bracket is completed. We’ve got plans to incorporate this better into Liquipedia, look forward to that.

We have also added pPingu to trial staff. He’s Swiss, so there’s got to be a cuckoo clock joke in here somewhere, but I’m pretending to rise above it.

LP: Introduce yourself!



LP: You seem overly enthusiastic, but I suppose that will fade with more time on staff. What got you started on TL?



LP: Three months from starting to contribute to full staff is quite impressive, and 3 silver LP coins. What's your motivation?



LP: What's your favorite food?



LP: And your favorite Dota 2 team? And your second favorite after TL?



LP: Where do you see yourself a year from now?



LP: Normal path in life or on TL, are you a student, and/or working some sort of "job"?



LP: Good luck. What degree did you end up with?



LP: Plans to design new hardware, perhaps you can build a new processor for Flash so he can win everything?



LP: Hopes and dreams for employment then?



LP: Sorry, I got distracted. I've also forgotten the next question. Please ask yourself a question and then answer it.



LP: So if you were given $1 million right now, what would you do with it?



LP: How do you think LPD has progressed since launch, and what's it still missing?



LP: What kind of things do you prefer to edit?



LP: List 5 reasons why Liquipedia > Writers



LP: Just remember that you have editors to fix all your mistakes



LP: Which is the better icon: puzzle piece or pen?



LP: But which looks better?



LP: Sorry wrong answer. Any final words for the readers?



LP: Thanks for your time, traitor!

We just read about some insight why people edit Liquipedia, but other than the obvious reason, we always cherish thanks and shout-outs from our ESPORTS celebrities and fans. But to be serious here for a moment, most of us do this to contribute and give back to this community. Whether we love the game or the people, we want to make our little bubble a bit better and getting recognition from the people we do this for is always a special feeling. So please enjoy these moments of recognition and random fun with us and let us brag a little.

@jacquelinesg
      @LiquipediaNet is my best friend. #SC2

@mouzMaNa


@followgrubby
      @ApolloSC2 bly won WCS ukraine
            @ApolloSC2
                  @followgrubby fml I forgot, damn liquidpedia Bly/Results
                        @AdebisiSC
                              @ApolloSC2 @followgrubby only one d in liquipedia.

@AdebisiSC
      Teamliquid is down, no Liquipedia, casters are fucked.
@AdebisiSC


@Kidjica


@StimiLant
      @LiquipediaNet hey liquipedia, amazing job in 2012, keep up the great work in 2013 gogogo

@PaulChaloner

---

If you've been inspired to make your mark on Liquipedia, remember that all you need to make a contribution is a tiny bit of time, the will, and an account on Teamliquid.net. We need more help with our Dota 2 wiki as Tephus stated, but not only for the esports coverage (player pages), we need help with the hero pages too. So if you want to support Liquipedia, and the fact that Liquipedia is growing outside of StarCraft, you know what to do.

Thanks for reading, and see you on the wiki!
- Liquipedia staff