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Behind Wowhead's Data: Perculia's peculiar talent for curation
I've always imagined the content manager of Wowhead as WoW's version of Star Trek's Majel Barrett, the iconic voice of the stream of data we can't help but consult like an oracle. Like Barrett, she sometimes appears in character, here in the game or there among the community blogosphere, but Perculia's primarily known for her steady grip on the fire hose of data represented by the Wowhead database. No mere data junkie, Perculia brings a trained art historian's sensibilities to curating the game she loves. Ironically, when Blizzard commemorated her devotion to WoW's data earlier this year by naming an item after her, it was a guildmate who discovered its existence and tweeted the link -- yes, a Wowhead link -- to her. WoW Insider: Perculia's Peculiar Signet -- congratulations! Tell us how Twitter managed to uncover this news before you did! Perculia: Thanks! I had just finished posting a daily blog to Wowhead News and was settling down to write about new archaeology changes when one of my friends and guildmates, Esoth, sent me a tweet with the Wowhead link. Half-expecting it to be a broken page that required coding, I was pleasantly surprised to see my name on it! To the best of my knowledge, the item had a different name when we first datamined it, which explains why I didn't notice it at first. I was super-excited and humbled when I clicked on the link; the following outpouring of congratulations on Twitter was similarly heartwarming. It's a fan's dream come true, one of those things everyone secretly thinks about but it's too abstract to think about practically shooting for. It's a lovely cycle where I was recognized for my contributions to the community, and my work in turn was shaped by my pre-Wowhead experiences in Azeroth.
