What Happened To The Post Counts on the MSDN and TechNet Wikis?

I’m a fairly heavy contributor to the MSDN and TechNet Wikis - also known as MSDN and TechNet Community Content. I started posting there pretty much ever since Microsoft setup this feature a couple of years ago. My contribution has included over 10,000 posts (just over 7500 to MSDN and over 2800 to TechNet). I wrote about the MSDN wiki in August.

I do not know if it’s a short term glitch or a more major change – but the post counts have been updated in a significantly downward fashion. TechNet shows just 1297 posts, while on MSDN just 3927) – thus I’ve lost around half my post count. At the time I wrote the august post, I had over 6500 posts credited, but now it’s a LOT lower.

MSDN/TechNet: what’s happened??

Technorati Tags: MSDN,Wiki,Technet Libraray,community content

MSDN Has A New Look and Feel

I spend time on the MDSN Site, particularly the MSDN Library sub-site where I’ve added a few PowerShell scripts as well as editing the content that is added. Just recently, the site has had a bit of a make over. The “MSDN-RED” logo is replaced wiht a more stylish blue colour, along with the opportunity to change your view of the site.

From FireFox, I have a new pop up at the bottom right hand corner of my browser window:

The “old” view, Classic is what you are used to, although with new colours. It is the view I will use going forward. Lightweight beta provides what it says, a much more lightweight feel. ScriptFree is even nicer (IMHO) to look at.  And being smaller pages, download times are much snappier.

But what both these two new views omit is all the community contnet (i.e. Community Content) as contained in Classic View. From the Script page, community added page tags are R/O, and there appears to be no way to see or edit Community Content (from both LightWeight and Script Free skins). And the big orange Switch View button from Classic view is pretty ugly and distracting – worse, there appears to be no way to tell it: I’m happy with what I see and please go away.  Or at least a more subtle control perhaps in the title bars like in the other views.

For casual users, or those on lightweight (aka celluar) networks, it’s a nice touch. Shame about losing the community content.

Technorati Tags: MSDN UI MSDN Community Content

The MSDN Wiki – a look after nearly 6500 edits

Last summer, I posted a blog article about the MSDN wiki, better known as MSDN Community Content (there’s also an equivalent set of content around IT Pro type information, namely Technet  Community Content. This morning I got a comment on that entry which complained about a) not being able to find stuff and b) that the community content idea had been killed. I posted a response to that comment – the Community content is still alive and kicking. In the past year, I’ve added over 6000 updates, the latest of which was a few minutes ago! I’ve also added around 2500 edits to the TechNet equivalent, or nearly 9000 edits in total – and I’m not even an MVP!

The Community Content represents some really great information – and not a few criticisms where the content (or the product!) is at fault. Sadly, as I noted last year, there is a degree of vandalism on this site, which has grown somewhat over the past year. I am fairly ruthless (although as not up to date as I’d want!) with reviewing new comments and removing what I call “non-content”, as well as duplicate posts which some times get made. I also try to ensure good tags. One trend that has accelerated is for posters to see the MSDN community content as a place to ask questions – a couple of posters including my self, point them to the community forums and the Microsoft newsgroups. I also try to ensure the tags on the each community content are relevant.

As ever in publishing, the MSDN content contains errors – usually minor typos, etc. While these are regatable, given the sheer scale of the MSDN (and TechNet) library, these are probably inevitable. Thanks to the sharp eyes in the community, these are found, and have been tagged “Contentbug”. Microsoft are slowly working through these and updating the content proving that the community review process is working, albeit much slower than I’d like.

All in all, the MSDN and TechNet Community Content  are fantastic resources, and are growing daily. Thanks to the MSDN/Technet content teams for providing the platform and working with the community to improve the content

Technorati Tags: MSDN,MSDN Wiki,Community Content,TechNet,Technet Wiki

Reducing Vandalism on Public Wiki Sites

I’ve been reading an interesting article from the New Your times on Wikipedia’s experiment to cut down vandalism. The approach is rather simplistic: get the community to check the update for lack of valdalism before the article is made available for general use. It’s a bit more complex than that, but basically by making most posts subject to review before  general posting, vandals are much less likely to see their work. The hope is the vandals just pack up and move along. It’ll be interesting to see what success this approach has.

I contribute to MS’s TechNet and MSDN wikis (aka community contributions) where vandalism also occurs. The vast majority of what I’m seeing is pretty minor and there’s not a lot of it: 3 to 5 posts a day with what I call “non content” such as an article saying “great” or just containing an email address or a web link. I can see these posts by following the RSS feed from the two sites –but all too often, by the time I hit the actual web site, those non-content articles are gone or un-vandalised. As a result, the quality of the contrubutions is not really affected by vandalism.

I wonder if a ‘checking’ approach would improve the quality of the MSDN and Technet wiki sites?

Technorati tags: community content, msdn library, technet library, wikipedia

MSDN Wiki - 1100 edits later

I've been contributing to the MSDN Wiki for a bit over a year. After an edit tonight, I see I've hit 1100 updates thus far, far in advance of the number 2 contributor!

The purpose of the Wiki is to enable the community to add content. This can be in the form of code samples, deeper explanations, or external references. I do see a bit of graffiti from time to time but thankfully the admins on the site are pretty quick to remove any vandalism (or 'non-content' as I call it).

My adventure with the Wiki started one Sunday afternoon a bit over a year ago. I was looking at a C# code sample on the MSDN site and was trying to convert it into PowerShell. Since PowerShell was built on .NET, it was supposed to be easy to just dig in and use the framework. But I just didn't get it - I was missing something. If I recall, I was trying to play around with the XML functions in PowerShell and just could not work out what was going on!

I posted a query in the most excellent PowerShell MS newsgroup and in under an hour, Keith Hill posted a reply that knocked the fog from my eyes and suddenly I was able to access a .NET Class. So I posted the sample, then a few more. It was a fun day. Then I posted some more and then more - my aim was to put the "PowerShell" tag at number 1 in the tag cloud.

Since then, I've posted just short of 300 samples showing how you can use PowerShell to access various parts of the .NET framework. Whilst working on the Microsoft PowerShell course, I delved into COM and WMI too!

I've also been updating my (and a few other) posts with better tagging. I've not been successful, yet, in the goal of getting PowerShell to be the number 1 tag: 695 posts are tagged as 'contentbug' with only 276 tagged as PowerShell so far.I probably need to check some of my posts to ensure they're tagged correctly.

I've found this most rewarding - I know a lot more about how to use PowerShell to access the core system functions, as well as knowing more about how those functions work. As a trainer, this have been invaluable in prepping up to teach PowerShell. It's also a wonderful reference for others to build on, as I've started to see.

A great challenge to trainers wanting to learn to teach PowerShell well - add a few samples yourself. Work with the examples from the course. Then find an undocumented class/method/member, etc. and develop some new samples. Carry on for a bit and who knows, your name may be in the top contributors list.

Technorati Tags: MSDN Wiki,PowerShell,MSDN,SDK,WMI,.NET,COM,scripting