To Learn and Translate

Hello Wiki Ninjas!
Luigi Bruno is here today for another appointment to share some brief thoughts about the Wiki’s world with you. Let’s go!

 

Learning by Wiki-ing

At the beginning of February, I’ve started a new “job adventure”: learning SharePoint 2010. I’ve to admit that I’ve always asked myself what SharePoint was and how it could be used: the Wiki helped me! I’ve found so many useful pages that guided me through the learning process, starting from the one written by Ed Price or the one about Designer written by Gokan Ozcifci and so on; maybe I’ve never noticed that before being so deeply involved with this platform, but I’ve realized that the Wiki has created a great and useful Knowledge Base that perfectly complements learning material provided by MSDN, TechNet and the seven (!) books that I bought and that I’m currently reading.
I’ve tried to give my modest contribution to this SharePoint KB, of course: since I’ve had to install SharePoint 2010 Foundation on my Windows 7 notebook to begin learning how to develop solutions targeting SharePoint by using Visual Studio, I’ve written a page to provide everyone interested in setting up a SharePoint 2010 development environment on a single machine with a simple step-by-step guide to create an “ad hoc” configuration; I’ve also started to create some “How To” documents to help SharePoint beginners (like me) to perform some simple tasks, both in English and Italian.
This is another Community win!

 

Recommended Readings

In my first post, I’ve talked about the importance of books in the process of learning and (of course) writing good articles for the Wiki: electronic documentation could be always up-to-date and easy to get, but the main advantage of learning from a book is the well structured learning path that the author created for the reader. Going on this way, I’ve created a few pages containing links aimed at suggesting or recommending useful books to the Wiki Community, containing links to the original web pages created by the books’ publishers or authors as well as links to pages created by the Wikiers: the first page contains links to books for developers (that I’ve also translated into Italian), the second one contains links to books for IT professionals; both the pages were tagged with the brand new “Recommended reading” tag and “Recommended reading” Wiki message template (I’ve always liked that Pronichkin’s idea).
As a first example of how a Wikier can suggest a useful book to the Community, I’ve created a page where I wrote something about one of my very favourite books, including a “plus” that, in my opinion, represents the real value added of the article. What could it be? Take a look!

 

The WWW (Wiki World War)

As you can see, the Wiki Internalization is going very fast! When we started this process, that seemed to be a very good idea, as long as many Wikiers started to translate articles written from other ones or writing their own articles in more than a language (as I always try to do). I’m also glad to see that the Italian Wikiers are growing up and increasing their contributions: I’ve tried to give my modest contribution when I was the only one Italian translator, but being more than one is always better (many thanks to Fabrizio Volpe for his precious contributions).
Ed Price gave me another good idea, as usual: as Italian language Wiki articles increase their presence on the Wiki, I’ve decided to create and use the “Translated into Italian” tag as a complement to the “it-IT” tag that we’re using to identify all the Italian articles; the official guidelines for the Wiki translations have been immediately updated, of course. Moreover, I’ve created a page that is intended to be a list of all the Italian language Wiki articles: Italian Wikiers, fill it with links to your works, please! Dulcis in fundo, I’ve also decided to create a page containing a list of all the translation tags that every Wikier can use: this could be a way to quickly find all the articles translated into a language.
And here comes the funny thing: try to guess who was the first one using the “Translated into English” tag! Maybe an English Wikier…? ;-)

 

Until next time, Happy Easter and have a great time Wiki-ing!

 

L.B. (Twitter, Profile)