DDJ: I know Microsoft is pretty proactive about tasking its product managers with hanging out in the newsgroups, and things like that. It would seem logical that if you own System.Windows.Forms, you might want to keep an eye on that section of the Wiki.
Rob: You see the same sort of thing happen in Wikipedia. There are certain topics in Wikipedia that people live and breathe by. Within 30 seconds of an edit happening to it, they're on there, either fixing something or correcting an inaccuracy. You might see the same association take place here. We have internal Microsoft people that are adding to the Wiki. 99 times out of 100, they are probably adding to the section of the Wiki that relates to their day job.
DDJ: Right. And that's the beauty of it. One other thing, and I hate to say this but I know it's true, a lot of the community that contributes to things like this does so for a certain amount of ego gratification. Maybe a better way to say that would be that people are contributing to make a name for them self, and get established as an experts on certain topics. What kind of facilities are there in the Wiki that reward people for making lots of valuable contributions?
Molly: That's a good question. Right now on the MSDN Wiki home page we list recent contributions and top contributors. This page gets a lot of traffic so being listed on it is a good way for contributors to gain name recognition with site visitors. The other thing that contributors really like is that when you register on the site you get a profile page. Currently, we don't let you enter a lot of information on the profile page. Basically you can enter a URL. But it's a place where visitors can go and see all the contributions from any person who has added content to the site. So that's something that we're investigating how we can expand this in the future. What we'd really like to do is see how we can extend some of these profiles across different MSDN sites. Right now, you might be contributing on the forums, on the Wiki, and on the feedback center. Basically, they're all separate right now. We're looking at how we can create a profile across the MSDN sites that will include bios and other things that let people promote themselves.
There's something you mentioned earlier in regards to the Microsoft contributors that I hadn't considered. I know who these contributors are, and what team they're on, and what product they're on because I'm also internal. But that information isn't available to the readers. I'm wondering what we can do to make it really obvious that this person is an expert working on the product, to let you know this is a person you can trust.
DDJ: Yeah, it's just a pretty typical feature of forums, and MSDN Wiki has a little bit of a forum feel. I could see somebody getting rated as being a top poster. They either post a lot, or their posts are highly rated by other readers, or both. Obviously all this stuff takes time to implement. But it seems to me that that would increase the popularity and encourage more and better contributions to the Wiki.
Another thing I've seen is that somebody will make the same post in 20 different areas in the docs because it's applicable to a bunch of API's under a given class, or a bunch of overloads for a given function, or something like that. Has there been much thought into letting a user make a single post that applies to more than one entry in the docs?
Molly: Yes, that's something we've talked about a lot because, like you said, there are a lot of places where the current contributors have added basically the same thing to a lot of topics. The contributor has to decide, "OK, do I want to go and copy this to all the different topics or put it in one place and encourage readers to go to that place from other topics." The problem is that if you want to update that content, you have to go and update it in multiple places, or the people reading the content need to click around to get to the actual information. We're looking at ways that we can let people add one content block that they can associate with multiple topics. For example, with overloaded methods you might want to provide the same content for every overload. We're looking at that kind of thing. We know that this is something, based on the activity we've seen on the current site, that will be useful for a lot of people. But I'm not sure when we're going to do it. It might not be until next version.
DDJ: Okay.
Rob: It's not easy.
DDJ: Sure, you don't want somebody to go to the root of the documents and say this piece of spam applies to everything. And at the same time you don't want people to have to repeat the same post literally 15 times, and have each instance stored as a separate post.
Rob: It's basically a bulk update. Maybe a bulk update is something that a moderator could do. Or, if you're on some trusted level on MSDN Wiki, you're able to do a bulk update. There's a million ways you could probably slice it.
