EPT![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/Kennigit/liquipedia/Liquipedia_Banner.png)
Some Opening Thoughts:
Liquipedia is alive and well! Since our release in June We have added almost 500 hundred new pages of content as well as vastly expanded our Progaming and unit info sections, making our dream of centralizing Starcraft knowledge a reality. The Liquipedia and TL staff called on the community to bring your SC knowledge to the table and you answered, quickly shoring up the wiki to cover all areas of competitive Starcraft. Truly we as a community have accomplished a great thing here.
As Mani said in the new TL Commandments, "The Eve of Starcraft 2 is upon us." Right now every fan of Starcraft sits nervously, wondering what the future will hold for the game we love. All the more reason for us to continue expanding Liquipedia to hold all that we have learned over the past ten years. Starcraft has brought us so much joy and taught us what it really meant to be pro at gaming. We owe it to ourselves to make sure that Liquipedia stands as a testament to Starcraft and Progaming.
There is an important part of Starcraft that we have yet to include in the wiki: Team based play. With 2v2 being pulled from Proleauge there has been a diminished interest in team play strategy and tactics. Well right now I say we change that. The Liquipedia staff wants to start a 2v2 Strategy section on the wiki and would like to invite the community members to join in a discussion to see how we might go about that. What would you want from a 2v2 Strategy guide? How would you like it formatted? These are all things that we want answered and we want you to be a part of it. For now, everyone head over to the Liquipedia feedback thread (in Website Feedback) so we can get the discussion rolling
I don't know about you, but I'd like to see the ICC news page read "Team Liquid Saves 2v2." Lets get to it!
How to edit a wiki: a guide to contributing to Liquipedia:
We've been getting a lot of PMs lately from people coming up with some great content for the wiki asking if we can add stuff for them. Unfortunately its hard to get tat stuff in without getting backed up on our review work and other content that we want to add to the wiki. For your convenience we wrote up this little guide to help you start of editing Liquipedia.
Liquipedia runs the Mediawiki software much like wikipedia or many of the other wikis that are out there. Mediwiki uses tags much like HTML does to tell the software how to format the text in an article. In this writeup we are going to walk through some of the more important tags that Mediawiki uses.
Creating Pages:
This is a particularly confusing part about the Mediawiki software: there isn't a create page button. If you are feeling particularly adventurous you can go out and create an entirely new page. There are two ways to do this. The first is to use the double brackets ("[[PageName]]") to create a link to a page that doesn't exist. These links appear in red an can be followed to create a new page. The second option you have is to use the search box to search for the page. If no page comes back you will be prompted to create that page. Either way users who feel up to it can add entirely new content to the wiki.
Let's start out by creating a sample build order strategy page called the Terran Big Game Hunters Build. Since we have a place we would like to place the page, the help table of contents we are going to edit that page and add "[[Terran BGH Build]]" to the list on that page.
![[image loading]](/staff/cgrinker/Creating_A_Page.png)
there are a lot of tags that are going on in this page, most of which we will talk about later. The tag we are going to look at here is the link tag we are using. We use enclosing double brackets ( [[My Page Here]] ) to mark links in a wiki page. Internal links, that is links that stay within the wiki use the the name of the page that we are linking to, in this case "Terran BGH Build." If we want to link to a page outside of the wiki we use its full url address. If you look at our tag for the BGH page you will notice the or symbol ("|") followed by "Sample Page." The reason for this is we want to override what is displayed on the link. When we choose to save this page we will see a link labeled "Sample Page," that links out to the BGH page we have made. As always, it is important to comment the edits that we have made to the wiki. At the bottom of the page is a box labeled "Summary," in which we can leave a comment for the edit history page. This not only helps keep track of edits but helps reviewers ensure speedy flagging of new content. More on that later.
Once we have saved we will see our link now appears on the screen in red:
![[image loading]](/staff/cgrinker/New_Page.png)
A link to an unedited page will always appear in red, once we follow it we are automatically taken to the edit page for that article. Because we are writing a Strategy article here it is best to stick to the general format of the other strategy articles. To do that we are going to recycle some work from another page in order to create a sort of template for our work.
![[image loading]](/staff/cgrinker/Empty_Page.png)
Here we have some headers and a partially complete infobox in the corner as well as the table of contents. We also see some of the normal things from strategy articles: build order, hard and soft counters, and maps. Once we go over to edit we can see some of the tags that let us make a wiki page:
![[image loading]](/staff/cgrinker/Infobox_and_Headers.png)
Here we see two important parts of wiki pages. The first is at the top labeled Infobox and is a few lines enclosed in double curly brackets ( " {{ }} ") As a quick and dirty answer double curly brackets mark a template and the or symbols followed by a name and an equal sign mark fields for that template to be filled in. These can get rather complicated for new users so for people creating new pages sometimes it's best just to cannibalize an infobox from another page and fill in the required fields.
The second tag to check out here is the enclosing equal signs. These mark headers in the page, with more equal signs marking deeper subsections. Generally in Liquipedia the double enclosing equal sign marks the highest level subsection, single equal signs create page name-sized headers. An important thing to note about headers is that creating three subsection tells the wiki to automatically generate a table of contents, so users never have to worry about creating those.
Now its time to add some content to this wiki page. We're going to head over again to the edit section and place the build order into the "Build Order" subsection. In order to create a nicely formated section we are going to use the asterisk marker ("*") to create a Bulleted List:
![[image loading]](/staff/cgrinker/Bulleted_List.png)
When we return to the page after saving we will see some nicely generated bullet points. Now though we run into an issue of build order clarification: what if the reader is unsure of how to make a sandwich? Here we can use another kind of this called a Numbered List. These are marked by using the pound key ("#"):
![[image loading]](/staff/cgrinker/Numbered_List.png)
As we can see we made a subsection in Build Order Clarification called "Making A Sandwich" by using three equal signs instead of two. This can help a lot in making sure info doesn't get cluttered on the wiki.
Now we are off to a good start with learning how to the edit the wiki. In our help section is a full list of commands that the wiki's parser can read, a lot of them are pretty awesome. Here's a finished product of what we edited:
![[image loading]](/staff/cgrinker/Final_Edits.png)
The Review Process:
Just to dispel the last of the confusion here is what the review process looks like on the wiki:
![[image loading]](/staff/Plexa/Liquipedia_How_To/8.png)
Users with Reviewer status or higher have access to a special page called Outdated Review Pages. This is where a list of all recent edits shows up. We then can click on Review to bring up a page that shows the differences between the "Sighted Page," or the current OK'd page and the "Draft Page," the page that contains the recent edits:
![[image loading]](/staff/Plexa/Liquipedia_How_To/9.png)
edits that are deemed all good get a comment and set as the sighted page. If your edits isn't approved and isn't blatant vandalism we will generally let you know on your wiki talk page. Every user has a talk page on the wiki and you get alerts across the top of the page when you get a comment left. We also leave nice comments!
