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

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