DDJ: So far I've been very happy with the Wiki. I think the concept is great. I'm a user of it. It's nice just to be able to go in and post information that shows up right in the docs. It's also great just to sit on the feed and glean the things that other people have been willing to share. I hope nothing but unbelievable success for the project. I think it addresses one of the most common complaints about the docs, which is that they're sometimes wrong, or they're often incomplete. There are sections of the framework that are practically undocumented. This lets people in the community just treat what Microsoft puts out there as a seed. The community can grow the content as much as they want from that point.
Rob: Yes, I fully agree.
Rob: One of the things that really drove home how successful this could be was when I started seeing people from whom I buy books posting content on the Wiki. For example, Dan Appleman recently contributed content to MSDNWiki. For anyone who's a Visual Basic developer, Dan Appleman's books are right up there in the pantheon of books you've probably read.
DDJ: Like I said, when Google can go through and index that stuff, it will be a great way for people to get their name out there. When you think of the top 200 book authors, you would hope that they would be contributors. And it probably wouldn't hurt their book sales one bit.
Rob: There's also a potential to expose an API for MSDN Wiki. Think about the kind of mash ups you could make.
DDJ: Okay, so that's an interesting concept. Right now you expose an RSS feed. But you're thinking about exposing a full service on top of the Wiki?
Molly: Yeah, actually MSDN has Web services that they're exposing right now that you can use to pull content and TOC structure. They're planning to expand those to include the community content. I'm not quite sure what the format will be, if you'll get both Microsoft content and community content all together or if you could pull one or the other. But it's something we have in the works.
DDJ: That's great. You talked about mash ups. I don't know if there's an easy way to do this, but think about the way a lot of content sharing sites make it easy for you to drop in their content without having to copy and paste. Think of YouTube and how easy it makes it to take one of their videos and embed it in your site, or on your blog, or whatever. It would be nice if there was just a little snippet of HTML you could throw into your blog that would suck in a piece of community content that was ultimately being pulled from the Wiki. It would be easy for you to include without a copy and paste of it.
Molly: That's interesting. That's one we haven't thought about. I can see people, if they're blogging about something in the Wiki, just pulling it in that way. That would be cool.
DDJ: Yeah. You could surface a little link and have it pull from the Wiki. So you're able to see how much traffic certain community posts get. That seems like another output that would be directly useful to a contributor to the Wiki. As Microsoft you would probably certainly want to know where the hot spots in the Wiki are. You'd want to see what community content people are reading about. Maybe those things are candidates for articles, or feedback for the product team.
Molly: We have an internal reporting site where Microsoft content authors can review information and feedback that's coming through MSDN, and now MSDN Wiki, about topics that they own. Just yesterday evening we launched an update that adds information about community content contributions to this site. We haven't thought as much about how to expose that information externally. But it is an interesting thing to think about. I can see how it would be interesting for people to see what community content is getting the most traffic.
