MSDNWiki Team Blog : Project Update

Community Content is 1 year old!

ClaytonR — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:25:00 GMT

On Friday, we had our 1 year anniversary of Community Content. The team would like to thank all the contributors over the past year as we look forward to the next. We have recently launched the same feature set over on the TechNet Library. We have SQL Server 2005 and Exchange 2003 docs online now with the feature and more coming.

For some stats and details on upcoming improvements, please check out Soma's blog post from Friday.

If you have questions or feedback, send us a mail @ MSDNWiki feedback.

Thanks, Clayton
MSDNWiki PM

MSDNWiki: Tagging has been released on the MSDN Library

ClaytonR — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:37:00 GMT

We just launched an update to the MSDN Library. As part of the release, a new tags control will show up on library documentation with the Community Content feature (currently 1.5 million pages across 7 languages). There is a page level tagging control right below the topic content and one added to each Community Content block. You will see this available on the following documentation:

Visual Studio 2005
.NET Development (2.0 & 3.0)
SQL Server 2005 Books Online
Office Solutions Development (Office 2007)
Win32 and COM Development

In case your new to tagging, here is a brief intro:

What are Tags and what is "Tagging"?

Tags are essentially keywords or labels added to an web page that are intended to describe the contents of the page so that it can be more easily retrieved and put in a structure. Tags are really just a special kind of attribute that help people understand what a given piece of content is about. Generally, when we talk about "tagging" we mean the process of applying tags to content.

For MSDN, tagging helps surface content that might not be easily discovered in the long tail of the Library. This is especially the case with newly added Community content. This implementation is unique in that the tags are wikified, meaning they can be added and/or removed by any and all users in the community. This isn't social bookmarking tagging like on Tagspace or del.icio.us. Those sites are about keeping your bookmarks or internet favorites for you and then sharing them out. Tagging in the MSDN Library is about helping content be discovered. This will help make search more relevant in the long term. Check out this query -> C# code examples. How cool is that?

How it works
There are two parts to using tagging on the site. The first is adding tags and the second is browsing the tags on the site:

Add tags to pages or blocks

Tagging a page: Navigate to the bottom of the page just above the Community Content header and click "Add a Tag". Enter a tag or a few that describes the page content and hit "Add".
To tag Community Content: Navigate to the block in Community Content and click "Add a Tag" on the control at the bottom of the block. Enter a tag or two that describes the content and hit "Add". You can also add\remove tags in the inline editor.

Browse tags to discover content - Click on any tag to see the browse by tags page. This page allows you to define a query based on combinations of different tags from content in the system to refine the results. You can also remove tags as needed to narrow down your result set.

Tag format

Multiple tags can be entered at one time. Separate each tag with a space.
Double quotes can be used to make phrases, but all is normalized to just one tag before saving.
Examples:

[aspnet code csharp] becomes three tags: "aspnet", "code", "csharp"
[system.xml C# "sql clr"] become three tags: "system.xml", "c#", "sqlclr"

Who can add tags?

Adding tags has the same requirements as the Community Content feature:

Live ID \ Passport is required
If you are new, you will have to set a unique display name and agree to the terms of use

Alright, now here are some links to get you started:

Library home page (tag cloud on right in Community Content box)
50 Most Popular Tags
Community Content Recent Edits RSS (you will see Tags: now in the feed)

Cheers,

Clayton, MSDNWiki PM

MSDNWiki: Community Content RC0 - post launch

msdnwiki — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 22:29:02 GMT

We launched on MSDN Community Content RC0 in early December. We have had some great feedback and little bit of criticism. As we are recovering from the holidays and getting back to the grindstone, I wanted to share a few things.

Activity so far

Right now, we are averaging about 10 new contributions a day (over the past 2 months). Not bad, considering they are pretty good quality by and large. In case you are interested, there is an RSS feed for our statistics that comes on the MSDN Library home page. Here it is for the English site -> http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/Community-stats(d=rss).aspx.

Known issues

Biggest pain I see right now is our inline editor. No cursoring down! What is that? Also, we are seeing duplicates in some RSS aggregators. Well, we are working hard now on these and other high impact issues and will be updating that code along with a move to the RTM of ASP.NET AJAX under the covers later this month.

Please use our MS Connect site to find known issues, post bugs and provide suggestions. It's not pretty, but this will help us all be more productive.

Thanks,

Clayton, MSDNWiki PM

MSDN Wiki migration to MSDN2

msdnwiki — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 01:28:00 GMT

Earlier this afternoon we pushed an update to the MSDN Wiki site that redirects all English pages on the site to MSDN2. This is in preparation for our launch of the MSDN Community Content feature on MSDN2 later this week.

Here are just a few benefits we'll get as a result of the migration of this feature to MSDN2:

The community content feature will be available on a wider range of topics. Along with the Visual Studio 2005 content, the Windows SDK managed reference docs will have the community content section when the feature is launched later this week. Many other Microsoft developer doc sets will add the feature over the next few months.
The Community Content will be accessible via MSDN search and public search engines.
The Community Content will be accessible through the VS IDE when you use online help.

All English contributions to the MSDN Wiki beta site will be migrated and visible on MSDN2. Accounts that were created on the MSDN Wiki beta site will be active and will have the same level of permissions on MSDN2.

The MSDN Community Content feature will be live on MSDN2 by the end of this week!

-- MollyBos, MSDN Wiki PM

MSDN Wiki Project Update

msdnwiki — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 21:20:00 GMT

After a brief (relatively speaking…) summer hiatus, the MSDN Wiki blog is back! Although the blog was on break for the past couple months, the MSDN Wiki project was not, and I have lots of news to share.

New Stuff

· As Rob Caron reported, we released an update to our English site in late August that fixed some bugs, including our earlier lack of FireFox support. We also provided some new RSS support; I’ll provide more details about this in a separate post.

· Yesterday, Somasegar announced our Brazilian Portuguese translation wiki release. This is our first experiment with a site closer to a “real” wiki, in that people can edit the content directly.

MSDN Wiki v1 Plans

Overall the community response to MSDN Wiki has been very positive. Because of this, and also to address several common MSDN Wiki customer requests, we’re in the process of migrating the MSDN Wiki Community Content functionality to the main MSDN Library docs. This means:

· The English Community Content functionality will be available on the main Whidbey doc set on MSDN2 by the end of the calendar year.

· The functionality will also be available on other localized versions of the Whidbey docs—languages that will be included and roll-out dates are TBD.

· The Community Content functionality will also be available on other MSDN documentation sets—for example, the Windows SDK, the SQL Server 2005 developer documentation, and the Office 2007 developer documentation. Which doc sets will include this functionality and when it will be added to them is TBD.

· Community content added to the English docs on the msdnwiki.microsoft.com site will be migrated to the new home on MSDN2. When the Community Content feature is launched on MSDN2, the English content will be removed from msdnwiki.microsoft.com.

· After the community content is migrated to MSDN2, it will be searchable via MSDN Search, Google, and other public search engines.

Got questions? Post them here, and I’ll try to respond. If I don’t, you can complain to my manager, Anand, who blogs about Sandcastle, and also occasionally posts about MSDN Wiki. :)

Cheers, MollyBos