Leaguepedia is a MediaWiki instance that covers tournaments, teams, and players in the League of Legends esports community. It's relied on by fans, analysts, and broadcasters from around the world.
Megan "River" Cutrofello joined Leaguepedia in 2014 as a community manager and by the end of her tenure in 2022 was the lead for Fandom's esports wikis.
She built up a community of contributing editors in addition to her role as the primary MediaWiki developer.
She writes on her blog and is a frequent speaker at the Enterprise MediaWiki Conference
Topics covered:

When to use MediaWiki
Visual vs code editor
MediaWiki's rough syntax
Templates and markup
Limiting user input to simplify pages
Choosing not to transliterate long player names in certain languages
Handling mobile clients
Building aliases for search results
Creating a single source of truth
Roster changes and caching
Cargo (Query data in MediaWiki templates using SQL)
Hiding implementation details from editors
Optimizing for the editor, not a clean codebase
Training your users to use workarounds
MediaWiki only supports es5
The wiki aesthetic
Who is working on the wiki + onboarding
Who is using the wiki
The future of Leaguepedia
How Megan got into wiki development
Issues as opportunities to onboard

Related Links

River Writes - Megan's Blog
Leaguepedia - League of Legends esports wiki
MediaWiki
VisualEditor
VueJS in MediaWiki
Open issue to support ES6 in MediaWiki
Whitespace programming language
Lua

MediaWiki extensions

CharInsert - Add code snippets into the MediaWiki editor
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) - Store and query data inside Wiki pages
Cargo - Replaced SMW at Leaguepedia

Conference Talks

Usage of Cargo with Lua on LoL Gamepedia
Mediawiker SublimeText plugin
Cargo/Lua Best Practices, and When Not To Use Them
MediaWiki Lua Tutorial
Editing your wiki with Python is easier than you think

Other podcast appearances

Between the Brackets

Transcript
You can help edit this transcript on GitHub.
[00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I'm talking to Megan Cutrofello. She managed the Leaguepedia eSports wiki for eight years, and in 2017 she got an award for being the unsung hero of the year for eSports. So Megan, thanks for joining me today.
[00:00:17] Megan: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:19] Jeremy: A lot of the people I talk to are into web development, so they work with web frameworks and things like that. And I guess when you think about it, wikis are web development, but they're kind of their own world, I suppose. for someone who's going to build some kind of a site, like when does it make sense for them to use a wiki versus, uh, a content management system or just like a more traditional web framework?
[00:00:55] Megan: I think it makes the most sense to use a wiki if you're going to have a lot of contributors and you don't want all of your contributors to have access to your server.
also if your contributors aren't necessarily as tech savvy as you are, um, it can make sense to use a wiki. if you have experience with MediaWiki, I guess it makes sense to use a Wiki.
Anytime I'm building something, my instinct is always, oh, I wanna make a Wiki (laughs) . Um, so even if it's not necessarily the most appropriate tool for the job, I always. My, my first thought is, hmm, let's see, I'm, I'm making a blog. Should I make my blog in in MediaWiki? Um, so, so I always, I always wanna do that. but I think it's always, when you're collaborating is pretty much, you always wanna do MediaWiki
[00:01:47] Jeremy: And I, I think that's maybe an important point when you say people are collaborating. When I think about Wikis, I think of Wikipedia, uh, and the fact that I can click the edit button and I can see the markup right there, make a change and, and click save. And I didn't even have to log in or anything. And it seems like that workflow is built into a wiki, but maybe not so much into your typical CMS or WordPress or something like that.
[00:02:18] Megan: Yeah. Having a public ability to solicit