Since past week I have some free time on my hands and nothing better to do. Four days ago, I decided I could try to edit Liquipedia again and see how much I could do in a day – just to fight boredom. The first day passed by, until I realized I could add some more to get a round number of total edits to my account – 2600. And so the fun started, it became a realy challenge. Eventually, the number came and went by. The new goal was to get to 500 actions on the Wiki in a shorter time frame.
Alright, so I was about to start, but I really had no clue where to start, which is never a really big inspiration. I had a look at the active contributor list to see what the other guys were working on, not that there are many people invovled with Liquipedia Brood War as of late. Two editors caught my eye: Xboi and Jealous, both of whom I know from different "projects". Xboi added tons of valueable information about technical stuff, which is desperately needed. Finding a person who actually understand what he does is difficult task. Regardless, more interesting was Jealous, who fixed tons of spelling. I remembered that he once told me the same thing Aesop mentioned: if you don't find a good project, hit the random page button!. So I did and the journey started.
The very first hit was WhistleR. The page was barren, it was tagged with the player-stub remark and had some things I really don't like style wise. For instance, his "Alternate IDs" listed his AKA with different clan tags. No shit sherlock, MgZ)WhistleR is the same as SJ.WhistleR? Couldn't have guessed in my wildest dreams. Yet, no information about interviews, only tournament finishes and some odd sentence. I shouldn't complain, I know how hard it is to add information. So I started to google with something like:
site:gosugamers.net whistler interview
To make things short, I found a lot of stuff I wasn't looking for, like at all. I faintly remember ending up on a strange interview of Elky. Let's just, well, do it with a picture, so you understand what happened next.
The flow chart actually falls a little short, a bit of information was left out. For instance, I took me a while to realize that the Swiss Tournament had eight and not only five rounds. More so, the information given on the original source didn't quite match what I calculated in hindsight - which happens so often, if you just have half-broken archives at hand. Presumably, the information of other pages, such as GosuGamers is correct.
I already mentioned it in some previous blog, but if you hit the random button often enough, you will read the same shit over and over again. Namely: no name Koreans. It's ghastly, there's actually some half wit Korean running around with a KeSPA license called KaL[KaL], the MoonMoon of professional Brood War. These pages are empty, more than 200 have a TLPD page, but nothing else. This bothered me so much, that I tried to convince our beloved salle to kick these pages. He didn't agree. However, he agreed to just move them to user space, so they won't show up anymore.
I couldn't help but rage for hours, silently. When I asked in #liquipedia how and why and stuff, people linked me to this one picture I really don't want to keep from you, if you don't know it already:
+ Show Spoiler +
I can totally imagine how some Korean sits there in front of his desk and goes like: Laaaan sliiiiiiiiiiiii duuuuuuu. Moments later: LanSliDu..[gm]. Bah. Anyhow, I was pleased with the result, even though I fucked up tons of moving. Shit happens, let's move on. Pun intended.
The rest of the edits was done rather randomly. I browsed several pages and looked what I could do to update design issues, add information or present data in a better way. The larger edits usually had something to do with adding results and formatting them, transforming text into replay boxes or something like that. Here's the more interesting stuff.
LoWeLy
After adding the Pokersharks.ru tournament series I happened to notice that LoWeLy had no page. I didn't worry, I remember his nick and I remember that he was featured in a lot of tournaments. What I missed was the consistency the Zerg showed in his career - in between 2003 and 2008 he managed to sneak into almost any Round of 16 of tournaments he entered. He went to more WCGs than half of the foreigners who have a page and most certainly had his fair share of good plays. Too bad he never won anything notable, otherwise he would have gotten his page a lot sooner.
Small Tournaments
The Pokersharks.ru Series was nothing big, at least not in the context of international Brood War in late 2007. The scene boomed and he we had so many events, it was hardly something you had to watch. Yet, it appears that IefNaij really started to win large things with this series - he managed to take down veterans and other new comers, people actually asked questions about the youngster back then. This all was hidden in comment sections of past pages.
loathe thy organizer
Seriously guys, whoever thought that "8 years, 43 Weeks ago" was a good way to describe a time frame should be shot and then shot again. GosuGamers, why are you so incredibly thick? Every single time I find something halfway interesting on your shit page, I read that on gosugamers/dota/ and have to go to wolfram alpha to decypher your jibber jabber. Get your act together.
More so, Artosis can bite me hard. I spent about two hours to figure out how his tremendous "Ascension" tournament series worked. Apparently, he created eight groups with three players in each. These groups started with a random match, winner stayed, loser had to wait. The guy to win most games within 2 hours would advance. What kind of Shit tour is that? imagine you're a Zerg, and have to wait for a TvT to finish. With any luck you get to play a game in which your opponent BBSes you and you just sit there and pick a name from a Queen song for your smurf.
Smurf
Some of you, prolly the SOSPA watchers, figured that there are tons of smurfs you sometimes want to know. E.g. to determine if Sziky plays some SOSPA gosu on stream. We editors face a similar problem, especially when it comes to Defiler Tours or ancient events. Smurfs are a bitch and you want to know. Hence this page, especially the List of known AKAs tab. I hope that will help everyone out in the future!
Last but not least, a few numbers, because everyone likes to fake statistics. I gathered information about my editing spree.
Explanation, top left:
Numbers of Actions x Hours spent Editing. Actions include moving pages and uploading pictures.
Explanation, bottom right:
Amount of symbols changed due to edits x Hours spend editing. The number of "symbol changes" represents what you actually did - if you change the result "W : L" into "1 : 0" you haven't changed anything. If you however added the word "hello" somewhere, you get a +5. It's more or less the "size" of your edit, but a very vague thing.
Anyhow, shout outs go to:
JiiPee, Rodney, and vegas_
I have no idea who you are, but I'm happy you're spying on us in #Liquipedia
Nominations
I now nominate AmazingXKCD, Noam and Salle to do the same within (500 actions, write a blog about the actions) the next four days. If they fail to deliver, each one of them has to eat vegan for the next month. Your turn.