DDJ: One of the things that's been the biggest surprise to me is who the contributors are. When I looked at the Wiki at the very beginning, I thought, "This is great. This will really let the community contribute tips and tricks, and lesser known facts. One of the things I found surprising is that the Wiki is almost a back door for Microsoft employees to build out the docs. In other words, I'll see a post from somebody who identifies themselves as a Microsoft employee, and they're posting really low-level information about exceptions that might be thrown, or why something is a certain way in the Framework, or even where they'll point out that in certain cases the actual documentation might not be accurate. When I look at it, I think, "Is this the person who actually wrote this particular piece of the API?" because the poster has such deep knowledge.
Molly: We've been very pleased with the amount and the quality of the information that Microsoft people have contributed. When we went through and looked at the contributors list, we found that the authors for the new content are heavily skewed towards Microsoft people right now. I think a big chunk of that is because of the fact that we have heavily promoted the Wiki among the developers at Microsoft. We have pretty good recognition within the company, and not quite as good outside of the company yet. A lot of the people developing Visual Studio and the .NET Framework are really excited about the Wiki. They have knowledge about things at a really low level, and Microsoft doesn't have the resources to capture that level of detail in the product documentation. This gives them a way to provide that information along with the documentation.
DDJ: Going in, I don't know that anybody foresaw Microsoft people would post so much "community" content, but it's a really nice side effect. In some cases you feel like there's a direct link between a developer who wrote a piece of the API, and the community out there that's trying to use it.
There's another thing that you've done that I really like; I might be one of the few people who takes advantage of this, but you expose an RSS feed, so if you want to see every piece of content that gets posted by the community, you can subscribe to that as a feed.
Rob: You've almost got to have it. Even though today, it's only the Visual Studio 2005 product documentation that's in the Wiki, that's still a huge body of content. And to try to keep apprised of everything that's changing in MSDN Wiki, the only other option would be to go browsing through it every day to see what's new. The RSS really gives you an opportunity to be constantly aware of what's going on. It also helps us because we get to see changes as they happen. That helps with the moderation process. It allows us to get an early jump on things if something goes awry.
