DDJ: Is there a point at which the MSDN Wiki will replace the traditional MSDN documentation? I know that if you're in Visual Studio right now and you hit F1 to go into the help, it's not the MSDN Wiki that you go to. Currently, the MSDN Wiki is a copy of the MSDN documentation, and it's in a different location on the Web.
Rob: Today, MDSN Wiki is a complete duplication of all the Visual Studio 2005 product documentation. That's an artifact of it being developed in its own little sandbox. Today, if you do a search on Windows Live or your favorite Web search engine, you wouldn't find any of the MSDN Wiki content. We've purposely blocked robots, spiders, and so on, because we'd end up getting duplicate hits on every single piece of content. But, the goal is to merge those two into the same content.
It's not a matter of the Wiki replacing the existing online content, or the online content going away. Basically it's just making one set available that will let search engines index it, and link to actual community content on MSDN Wiki. The success of MSDN Wiki to date is entirely the result of word of mouth and people blogging about it, because you can't find it by searching for it. In just the last two months, the number of people going out of their way to put the content on the Wiki is pretty remarkable. Once that content starts showing up in search engine results we're going to see a spike in the amount of contributions happening to MSDN Wiki.
DDJ: Yeah, I could imagine that you might see a 5 or 10 X increase in contributions. Based on what you're saying, right now if you don't already know it's there, you're not likely to find it. That's about to change.
Rob: Right.
DDJ: You mentioned that you're not currently seeing problems with vandalism, but again, when it goes public, you might see those kinds of problems appear.
Rob: Right, and that's part of the risk of having a publicly accessible Wiki. It just goes with the territory.
DDJ: Have you disclosed any time frame for when the MSDN docs switch over to MSDN Wiki?
Molly: The current plan is that in December we will have the current MSDN Wiki English content merged into with the main MSDN Library. From there, the functionality will sort of graduate to other documentations sets. I've gotten a lot of questions about, "When can I have this?" Basically it's all coming gradually starting in December.
DDJ: Right now, the contributors are almost all insiders, people who know it's there. Then, it will go public and the Visual Studio/.NET Framework docs will include the "Community Content". Assuming that's successful, and as you iron out any problems, you'll expand it out to more and more document sets, until, I'm guessing, that this is just the way Microsoft does documentation going forward? Is that too broad of a swath?
Rob: No, it's actually fairly accurate. The other thing that's going on in parallel with all this is that MSDN and TechNet are both undergoing a transition in the publication system that they're using. People are probably familiar with the MSDN2 version of the library. That is a version of those product documents published in the new publishing system. MSDN Wiki uses the new publishing system that MSDN2 uses, so the only content that we can provide the Wiki for today is content that exists in that new publishing system, and that's actually what limits which document sets can be part of MSDN Wiki.
DDJ: I see, so until you get more document sets running on that engine, you can't really Wiki-enable them. Once you do, it becomes almost automatic to provide the Wiki functionality.
Rob: Right, there's basically nothing that blocks us technically at that point.
