MSDN Wiki
MSDN Wiki!
It’s live! https://msdnwiki.microsoft.com
See Soma’s blog (Announcing the MSDN Wiki Beta!) for the official announcement. You can learn more about the project by following the MSDN Wiki team blog.
I’ve watched this project grow for many months, and helped when I could. It’s exciting to finally see it out on the Web. Now, some will be quick to point out that it doesn’t have full wiki functionality as defined by Wikipedia:
A wiki is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit all content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration.
MSDN Wiki will continue to evolve. Today, what you see is more of a companion wiki to the existing product documentation. It allows you to contribute blocks of content for each existing help topic. For a v1 documentation set, such as Team Foundation Server, the opportunity to contribute valuable information is rather large.
MSDN Wiki provides a venue for the entire MSDN community to collaborate and contribute. As I noted last year (What is Community?), a body of knowledge is one of the key characteristics of a technical community. I also stated that content is simply the persistence of community knowledge. With MSDN Wiki, we now have the ability to persist that community knowledge alongside the official product documentation.
In Soma’s blog, he asked a couple questions that should give you some indication of the potential of MSDN Wiki:
- How important is it that Microsoft provides an official version of the docs that cannot be altered by the community?
- For Orcas, should we completely open the documentation to editing?
We aren’t paying a Donald Knuth-like finder’s fee for errata, but we are giving you the opportunity to show off your knowledge, and publish it in a location visible to the thousands of people who visit MSDN each day.
If you’re attending TechEd next week, be on the lookout for the people in Hawaiian shirts who are there to promote MSDN Wiki. We’re also holding two chalk talks in the Technical Learning Center:
- Tuesday, June 13th at 1pm
- Wednesday, June 14th at 10:15am
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