Entries tagged with wikis - Channel 9

MSDN Wiki Projects - #4 (last) - Internationalization

Rory — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:14:28 GMT

This is the final video in the MSDN Wiki interview series. In this segment, I talked with Fabrice and Molly about the MSDN Internationalization Wiki.

I love language - the living ones, the dead ones, the spoken ones, the ones nobody speaks anymore, C# - and I had a lot of questions in my head about how The MSDN Wiki people were going to accomplish the insanely difficult task of translating select bits of the MSDN library into Portuguese.

English, unless you're a native speaker, will probably never make total sense to you (and doesn't even make total sense to those of us born speaking it), while Portuguese, although not the sloppy mashup of languages English is, is still very complicated.

So, how do you take a bunch of English and translate it into a bunch of Portuguese?

Fabrice and team are accomplishing this mountainous task with a combination of some awesome MSR produced software and an army of contributors from around the world.

This video also marks the end of my first real attempt at splitting up one long video into a few smaller parts. Did you like it? Did it work for you? Aside from the sloppy edit points (something I know to look for now), is there anything about this approach that bothers you? I was thinking it would have been nice to have posted the parts over a longer period of time, hopping between a couple other "chunked" videos - there'd be more variety that way.

What do you think? We're listening, yo......

The Series:

- Video #1: How and Why

- Video #3: Internationalization

MSDN Wiki Projects - #3 - A Huge Responsibility

Rory — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:44:26 GMT

When you're in charge of something so large, so easily modified by the public, and so potentially impactful, how do you actually do it?

Accuracy, relevance, usefulness, language, abuse, and more - these are just a few things that might keep you up at night if you're one of the people overseeing a corporate wiki.

At Channel 9, for example, we're on a pretty long leash. The freedom we enjoy in content creation and community activities is astonishing. Along with that freedom, though, comes a lot of responsibility. Anytime we put content online or interact with customers, there's the possibility of really blowing it. Fortunately, we actually do all right, but the concern is always there. It's natural. It has to be.

The situation is even more interesting for wikis. Where Charles and I have control over the content we produce, a wiki takes a lot of the control away from the site owners.

So, what do you do? How do you even begin to think through all the things that could go wrong? What kind of editorial oversight is there? How do you choose what's to be documented? How do other people at Microsoft feel? What legal concerns are there? What's the hardest part about getting a wiki up and running here?

When you aren't responsible for a project like this, it's easy to forget just how much risk is in place, as well as how many technical and editorial issues there are.

This is the third part of the interview, and we tried to address some of these issues. The deeper we went, the more interested and impressed I was. I loved learning about Fabrice and Molly's jobs. There are so many angles to this Microsoft wiki stuff that I would have been happy to have talked to them for many hours more.

Such a unique and delightful challenge...

The Series:

- Video #1: How and Why

- Video #3: Internationalization

MSDN Wiki Projects - #2 - How and Why

Rory — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:40:38 GMT

[Note: Looks like I made a couple small mistakes while chunking the original interview up into smaller pieces. While it looked like they were ending at exactly the right time, it appears each video has an extra second or two of talking that I meant to cut off. The result is that the video stops right in the middle of a comment by Fabrice that's actually for the next video in the series. Simply put, there's nothing missing, and Fabrice will get to finish his comment in the next video - apologies :| ]

Whatever warm cuddly advances are made by large corporations toward community efforts and transparency, there are still serious and valid concerns about the ramifications of letting civilians produce content.

This is part two of the series on the MSDN dev and internationalization wikis.

In this one, we talk about some of the work Fabrice and team had to do to push these projects through, get them approved, and implemented.

Don't know about you people, but I look at community involvement as being a great thing for everybody. However, I'm not the one who has to take responsibility for opening up a site to modifications from the general public. When we see these projects, it's easy to forget the kind of risks that are being taken on behalf of the employees who drive the efforts.

This interview reminded me of what those risks can be...

The Series:

- Video #1: How and Why

- Video #3: Internationalization

MSDN Wiki Projects - #1 - Saying Hello

Rory — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:50:31 GMT

This short video is the first of a four part series in which I sat down with Fabrice Fonck and Molly Bostic to talk about the MSDN DevWiki project.

As usual, I walked in thinking I already had a good grasp on the subject, but quickly found out that things were much more complex than I ever would have thought.

For example, do you have any idea how many user interface elements there are in Visual Studio? How many words there are in the documentation?

I had a figure in my head - just a wild guess based on what seemed realistic to me.

I was off by several decimal points.

Like many other web devs, I've done a lot of internationalization work, but nothing like this.

That same complexity is the reason it was decided to kick off some wikis for MSDN. One for general documentation (look for "Community Content" mixed in with the normal stuff), and the other for internationalizaion (Portuguese).

The task itself is amazing, and that doesn't even account for all the planning around infrastructure. It's hard enough documenting a large product - now imagine doing it in a bunch of different languages.

This video is the introduction to the topic, and the next three drill down into specifics.

If you feel like you have a little too much on your plate at work, then watch this series. You'll feel much better :)

Also, if you're working on something as big (or bigger), say something about it in the comments. ......

The Series:

- Video #1: How and Why

- Video #3: Internationalization

Creating Windows SharePoint Services Sites with Support for Wikis and Blogs

doncho — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:35:07 GMT

Leverage the new built-in WSS features for creating sites with blogs and wikis.

Sam Gentile and Ward Cunningham - Recounting early days of Wiki

scobleizer — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:12:14 GMT

Sam Gentile and Ward Cunningham met up with us at the GotDotNet Code Slam event held recently in Microsoft's Visitor Center.

You might know Ward Cunningham. He invented the Wiki. Sam was one of the first users of Ward's technology. Back in the mid 1990s. They have a chat about software development and how things have changed since the early days of the Wiki.

They also talk about test-driven development and extreme programming, both topics that Sam and Ward are passionate about.

Oh, and they go through Microsoft's museum and took a walk down memory row. Ever write code for a Radio Shack TRS-80? You might like that part.