My Backlog

Quick introduction

This is about my backlog when contributing to Liquipedia's Rainbow Six wiki, most of it will probably be the same as for other big contributors, either on this wiki specifically or on other wikis. It's how I'd rank everything at the time, before I lost my motivation to contribute due to the whole ordeal.

I wrote it from my perspective, so I hope it doesn't feel disingenuous towards other contributors. And I'd like to thank Pikana for proofreading most of it.

The list

1. The day-to-day stuff

The one that takes the least amount of time, not to be misunderstood with 'easy' or 'no time at all', it just takes less time compared to the rest. Things like match results, daily roster moves etc. If you've only ever browsed Liquipedia then you might think this is the only thing there is to do, but it isn't. It's just relatively trivial compared to the hours you'll spend on the other items on this list.

2. Sourcing

Pending Changes, Unreviewed Pages, if it takes more than 10 seconds to approve it's because it either needs to be verified or because it needs a source. This takes time, depending on what it is.

Typically, I'd spent one hour at most per change, depending on how easy it should be to find a source and how important it is. Did your favourite player just get new gear, and you updated it? Great! Did the player only mention it on stream and not on Twitter or their panels and chat bot? Not so great... Nobody is going to watch an up to 6-hour VoD just to verify new gear, make a clip and post a link to it in the summery box.

If it's not findable in those places it'll likely be nowhere to find. This doesn't mean I don't believe you, so if you got it from the player directly through DMs then I'd love to believe you. It's not like it's a major issue if a player's gear turns out to be slightly wrong, but you'd still have to say where you got it from because a source is still required to be listed.

Of course, there are more important things that do reach that one-hour mark, such as crucial tournament information. And obviously sometimes you'll leave it for someone else to check just in case.

3. Patches

Yes, Liquipedia has every single patch listed, Pikana started adding it with Para Bellum, 3.2.1 and 3.2.1.1. This is probably one of the most memorable things I've been able to add, if only because It's mainly been me.

Obviously, it may not seem like it could've taken a massive amount of time, but that's only because you're ignoring markup. You'll still have to go through every section and add links to the maps or operators, their icons and obviously changing the capitalization of the titles. It's mainly very tedious, and a pain with seasonal releases due to their size.

Beyond that, the historical patches from prior to the wiki's existence or this section, I will thank Medlone who's an admin on the Rainbow Six Fandom wiki, if only because their patch note list was a really helpful guide on major patches. It didn't list everything, but that's fine, you should never copy another wiki verbatim and should always verify it yourself to be sure. Because of this, I spend quite a bit of time going through the Rainbow Six Twitter and the news section on the forum to get every single patch that included a client download.

4. Future tournaments

Not the hardest, if only because eventually you'll make templates for common types of tournaments. It'll still take a bit of time but once you got a understanding of how it works it's not the most difficult. You'll also probably understand that future tournaments are rather essential to a wiki like Liquipedia. The main thing is that it just takes time, like most things in life. And that time will add up, and thus push other items further away.

5. Past tournaments

Liquipedia has a lot, but a lot of old tournaments aren't there yet. With regards to Siege specifically there's a lot missing from the first year, but also from past Rainbow Six titles.

In the past I already added all the missing qualifiers of the Six Invitation 2017, doing all of them is a really big undertaking, as typically you're working with a lot of outdated or now changed content. For example for each open qualifier I had to manually look up past names, not the most difficult of tasks when teams aren't deleted but still very time consuming.

After having done the Six Invitationals I made plans to move to the first year of Pro League, where a lot is missing. However I had to cut it short after Season One on the PC, and thus you'll find the Xbox One leagues woefully incomplete in comparison. Which once again comes down to a lot of time spending on getting the original names of participants.

Of course that's not the only thing, the entirely of Ubisoft Elite Six is missing as well as it's Go4 equivalent and I'm sure there's more that needs to be done in this regard. Nonetheless this was what I was working on almost exclusively if no tournament had any ongoing matches.

6. Operators

Admittedly, if I didn't add them after they're announced then Medlone would add them the day after. So, this one isn't about the pages themselves, but their content. More specifically, their gadgets and, somewhat comically now, their notable players. Both would've taken me a lot of time, and for both I've only done two.

Version history

I wanted to include fixes as well rather than just buffs and nerfs, to do this I thought about having a toggle button to show them if the user wanted to. When it comes to its implementation, it'd probably just use the same functionality used on the pubg wiki for their multi-round matches. But, like most things on this list, I never got around to doing it.

Gadgets

For gadgets, there's a lot, there's lots of them after all. It's mainly missing data, like damage, radius, and timings such as cooldowns. Currently, only Maverick and Tachanka have full information regarding their gadget, and for both it involves a painstakingly long process of manually testing the game, recording to get timings and the likes. It's a very time-consuming process, and so every operator has a lot of missing information for their gadgets.

Notable players

Going through fifty to one hundred matches over a six-month period minimum per individual player taking down their operators every round just to get a statistical version of their notable operators. I don't think I really need to explain why this one would take so much time, and why I've only done this for two players.

Pretty much everyone you see is done by other people, people with brains, people who realize it just fetches it from player pages that have notable operators set. The process of going through hundreds of matches for just a single player when there are hundreds of players that have pages already is an immense undertaking, and as always, other important stuff goes first...

7. Maps

For maps there's just more details like general map information. Outback is still missing defender spawns for Secure Area and Hostage, which is somewhat important. I've already updated the Portal to be more detailed. Beyond that, it's the same story as with Operators pages, I wanted to include a version history, but like most, doing this takes time.

8. Weapons

I've been wanting to rework the attachment section, nothing specifically major but I've been wanting to do it. For this I already got the images for each attachment, so it was pretty much a case of making it look good and then replacing it everywhere.

Outside of that, I wanted to add a section to show weapon changes, as well as fixes, just like with Operators and Maps, assuming they're there.

9. Event pages

They're a thing too, just not much of a focus as other pages are more important. For this there's not much depending on the event, for example, for DreamHack all the text is just from other wikis. There's however still a lot of time spend gathering data and presenting it well. For other events however it's also a case of writing that text. This isn't to say I've done that, the only page where I've put a lot of time into is the DreamHack page, all other event pages are done in full by other contributors.

10. Team pages

This is my backlog, not someone else's. But to me, for a wiki like Liquipedia, I find the other items far more important than this one. It's not much, once you have a template, copy paste, replace the details, look up past roster moves with the team if they've had them. But, depending on the age of the team it can be very time-consuming.

So, for a page that you might think is so easy to make, it'll also require the most up keep, at least in terms of its longevity. If I have to spent time on updating a team page due to a player joining, then it's time I can't spend time on any of the past items. Luckily enough however, they rarely announce leaving. Just look at Keyd Stars and their nine-man roster.

Jokes aside, with too many of these pages you'll have this problem too much and so I value the 'do it once don't touch them ever again' pages more, beyond the fact that they inherently are more important, after all, without any tournaments there is no way to prove you're notable.

11. Individual pages

This is pretty much the same as the last, the only reason why I felt to have this one separate is for pages regarding talent, not having to look up the real name and nationality for every single commentator saves quite a bit of time. So those pages have genuine usefulness attached to them as they reduce the time it takes to make a tournament page. Even if it's only a one-minute time save, it'll add up quite a bit after a few dozen tournaments.

Beyond talent however, the exact same applies as for the last one. More player pages just mean less time to spent on what I consider more important due to the upkeep these kinds of pages require.

12. Cosmetic items

It's been sitting there since the main page was added, the cosmetic items guide. But due to alpha packs and timed exclusives it's pretty much impossible to do this without Ubisoft cooperation as the game files have been encrypted since the release of Blood Orchid. So, it's here at the end for that reason, more so a question mark than a I'll do this after I've done the rest item.

It would be a massive time investment, obtaining the original images used to showcase each skin and then getting a good preview of the skin on the weapon or operator. But the point is, I wanted to do it, it just never had to be...

Final notes

So to reiterate, you can't get a page because the time it takes to do something. If someone only has 30 minutes per day to spend on contributing, then they can only spend it on the most important items, which are the day-to-day stuff exclusively. Just because they don't take the most of time, doesn't mean they take no time at all.

Maybe one day in the future I'll be able to rediscover my motivation, but I'm doubtful it'll happen. I'm not expecting people to apologize, you don't really have to if you weren't rude. My only real disdain is the lack of ownership people are willing to take to own up to their part in this.

For better or worse, I've also been able to play the game again. So this whole Liquipedia thing has taken quite a bit of time away from me, leaving me now able again to focus on playing the game.

I'll admit; diamond would've looked more impressive.