Table of Contents
New Staff and Reviewers
Mobilizing the wikis
New Team League result boxes
Cross table highlighting
A thank you to all the contributors
Interview with Clubfan - one of our new Reviewers
Stories from the Twitterverse
Do you know this Liquipedia feature?
The Next Big Step!
Hello peoples of the interwebs and welcome to the Liquipedia StarCraft II Review.
It might appear we have been slacking off again with the reviews since the last one, but we've just been doing them for each game individually. See we decided that doing a review for more than one game was tedious to read at best and confusing to read at worst.
Recently we reached 1 million edits across our wikis, which is a milestone we could not even have dreamed about when we started the Liquipedia project. We are proud to have all those contributors putting in time for our common hobby, because it is not self-evident, that a project gets as much positive response and help, as Liquipedia does (not that we could not need even more contributions ^^).
However, the StarCraft 2 wiki is still the wiki that gets most views, and there's still new stuff that gets done there. Obviously this requires a great review too, so read and enjoy, the new awesomeness gets described right here!
New Staff and Reviewers
Clubfan, Farone, Dr.Waffles, DARKING, WarhOk, and Androxide were all promoted to the rank of Reviewer for their contributions to Liquipedia and knowledge of how the wikis work.
Along with new Reviewers we also have some new staff members: Yhamm and FO-nTTaX.
Mobilizing the wikis
Recently we got quite a few questions if there is an app for Liquipedia. The answer is no, and this will not change in the foreseeable future.
Instead we're focusing on making the browser version of the wiki mobile friendly.
We started this by changing the Main Pages of the wiki. Whilst nothing has changed for normal desktop users, the look and feel has changed quite a bit for mobile users. The new mobile Main Pages have big buttons that can be easily used on a touchscreen, and have a clean look only showing the part of the page the user wants to see.
In the recent past we changed quite some code and got the brackets shrinkable. No longer do you need to scroll around to get a first look at how the brackets look, since the brackets are shrinking to fit into your browser window. You can still view the template details by tapping on the bracket and bringing it back to normal size, so don't worry about not being able to read the shrinked brackets.
The infoboxes were reworked too, so they are looking better on mobile devices. If your phone is rather small, they simply go full width, so you do not have single word lines beside them.
However there's still lots of things to do, if you have an idea or suggestion for how something could be adapted from desktop to mobile don't hesitate in giving us that feedback (images or collages with scribbles on are really good to show graphical ideas.) If you think this is an interesting challenge and want to help out directly that is obviously even better. We will mostly just be using HTML/CSS and in a few cases we can also use JS, but ideally that's a last resort if there's no other way.
New Team League result boxes
On the players results pages, we have had a unified system of showing results for quite some time, but the results boxes of team leagues always stood out. They were not coherent with the other results, and thus looked a bit off on these pages.
We changed this, and got the team league result boxes to look like the other ones.
The change promises easier readable results pages, since the readers will not have to understand multiple different formats how the results are displayed, and adds significantly to a unified look across the wiki.
Cross table highlighting
We introduced some highlighting for the cross tables whilst The International 4 was running for the Dota 2 people and soon after ported it to the StarCraft 2 wiki too.
The problem with the highlighting was, that it made the highlighted parts a bit harder to read as a price for easier finding them. Also it didn't look too good on Chrome.
To change this, we redid the cross table highlighting to better highlight the focused parts without making them harder to read.
A thank you to all the contributors
Have you seen the MLG Anaheim brackets (2014 MLG Anaheim)? They are insane, and it would not be possible to fill them without the help of our contributors. Of course this is true for all the tournaments we show on our wiki, the MLG is just a really big example. Filling in information about a tournament does not only mean filling in brackets, but also means inserting the results on player results pages, putting them on team results pages, updating the recent results pages and so on. Every change has multiple changes based on itself.
Also we changed quite a few templates in the recent past that had to be updated on many pages, which took hours and could not have been done without a lot of helpers to do these changes.
It is a lot of work and there are a lot of contributors helping out, a thank you to all of them, they are the real heroes of the wiki!
Interview with Clubfan
FO-nTTaX: To start off this interview, please introduce yourself
Clubfan: Hi guys and girls, my nickname is Clubfan (it comes from a local football club, the "1. FC Nürnberg"), i'm 16 years old and currently going to a german highschool. I'm playing SC2 since late 2011 on a very casual level :D
FO-nTTaX: Which is why you edit that much I guess?
Clubfan: Right, I have lots of spare time, school is fortunately not that hard
FO-nTTaX: So how did you get into editing Liquipedia, and do you still remember the first page you edited?
Clubfan: I first came into eSports via watching HomerJ, a casual german caster. There was a running gag about MaNa being only 16 and faking his age to participate in premier tournaments and one of HomerJ's crew member said, that even "Liquipedia" was lying. So I checked it out and indeed, he was older. Every time I wanted to know something about a player, I visited Liquipedia from that day on.
Soon I started to watch other streams, like TaKeTV, and professional tournaments. I was browsing the 2013 WCS Challenger Season 1 and noticed a group missing 'down'-arrows. Because I've always wanted to contribute to a community project like Wikipedia, I decided to fix it myself.
And I think it was DreamHack Summer
FO-nTTaX: Cool stuff, people like you are responsible for the good name Liquipedia has in the scene!
What was the coolest page you have seen on the wiki?
Clubfan: Thank you! Oh, I can't really decide. The TI 4 pages are very cool, all these new templates (cross-tables and team cards) are looking pretty sick. But the one for 2013's BlizzCon with all its players' pictures is cool, too. The funniest one should be NinaZerg's userpage, it's hilarious.
FO-nTTaX: The TI 4 pages are impressive, true. Any other cool things you know about the wiki, like funny anecdotes with other editors or something?
Clubfan: Well, one is for sure with GeckoVOD: He's living in the same region as me and in one night, he wrote on LP's IRC channel that everybody should go outside because the sky is red and orange, I did go outside, it was pretty cold (because it was 2 am) and the sky was totally normal, later he told us that he had already some wine ^^
Also, some day, draverawr asked Yhamm about his real name, he didn't want to answer it, so everybody made up names like "Jacques" or "Kevin", but we agreed on "Meg".
Every time someone calls him Meg now, he gets banned by Yhamm and we still don't know his rl identity. There are plenty more, just lurk on IRC
FO-nTTaX: Ok, people told me to ask you some non Liquipedia questions, so here we go:
What is your favourite food?
Clubfan: It's Leberkäse, which is pretty difficult to describe, so I'll go with steak ^^
And Schnitzel (I really love meat)
FO-nTTaX: Which Superhero would make a good Liquipedia contributor and why?
Clubfan: Mmmmh, maybe Flash because he could type very fast? But to be honest, he couldn't live-update faster than Yhamm ^^
But Flash could do some really time-consuming tasks like changing all {{Ro}} templates to {{Pl}} on all results pages in a fraction of a second
FO-nTTaX: Which (sub-)forum of TeamLiquid.net is the coolest (besides the glorious Liquipedia Contributors forum)
Clubfan: Uhh, I'm actually not that much on the forums, but I'd go with the blogs (are they really a sub-forum? *insert x-files theme here*), I really love them, especially the [GIRL BLOG]s ^^
They're always pretty entertaining
And all LP blogs
FO-nTTaX: So when will we see your first Girl Blog?
Clubfan: Puh, really hard to say that, I have to finish my 3k edits/gold coin/reviewer blog, but I haven't even started it yet :/
FO-nTTaX: Too bad. Well i guess the last words are for you, so time for shoutouts now if there are any?
Clubfan: Oh yes, there totally are a lot: Thank you Chapatiyaq, FO-nTTaX and salle for your patience with my shrubby (shout-out to Oddyesy ) questions, also thank you for helping me with template problems late at night. Another one goes to GeckoVOD for his immense efforts to conserve the legacy of Brood War. Also one to Yhamm for sniping my updates and some shout-outs to Androxide, Josh_Video, Oddyesy and draverawr for being super awesome on IRC and in editing (dave: typo-fixes ftw!). Sorry to everybody I forgot, but I still love you!
And a thousand ones for everyone contributing to Liquipedia, you really make it awesome and more like a family than a website!! <3
Stories from the Twitterverse
Do you know this Liquipedia feature?
Did you ever notice the "i" in our brackets? No? Then you definitely missed some awesome stuff. Really, you should try it. See, it is awesome, we got match details in our brackets, like maps played, links to VODs and when a game is played. Not only is this useful before the matches when you want to know when the matches are starting, but it is also useful after the matches to find the VODs of games you might have missed because the tournament organizers decided to let multiple groups play simultaneously. Simply click anywhere in a matchbox that has the "i" in to increases your tournament experience so much, you will love it once you have seen it.
Another rather unknown feature is our WCS calendar, that links you to all the relevant tournaments in a glimpse. No longer will you have to search for upcoming tournaments giving out WCS points, instead you will find them all in one place. Go check it out, it is awesome.