Community Win: Our Collaboration and Technet Wiki as a Collaboration Platform

Welcome again to the Community Win series of the Technet WikiNinjas Blog!

Without collaboration of the members, a community can be doomed. And sharing information is essential for effective collaboration in the life of every community.

However this exchange of information needs a platform, especially when the community is global - and the activity of the Technet Wiki community is a good example of collaboration, and the Technet Wiki is a good example of a platform for that. Why? A lot of people creates new Wiki pages with new content each day, and corrects, revises, or comments existing articles, or comments from others here. And it's very easy for them. Of course, not every article changes each day, but it can happen that the content of a page is perfect in a specific point of time :)

Just for an example: let's take a look on the "Active Directory: Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Commands and Scripts (en-US)" article. It was created by Santhosh Sivarajan on 23th June last year.

After then, the page developed somehow like this due to community activity:

[Yes, Excel fun. And the chart is not stacked :) ]

The point is that this article didn't have its first birthday yet, but it had more than 40 revisions already! And seven different community members contributed to it. (The last one was a change in the title of the article to increase the accuracy of searching.)

Just imagine an internal corporate wiki site - for example, used as a knowledge base. If the policies of the company regarding wiki updates are not strict enough, there is a high chance that the content will be outdated sooner or later. But - strictness? I think a community with committed members does not need that. Since Wiki started, "2,355 users have contributed 8,281 pages, 46,353 revisions, and 20,738 comments". You can follow these statistics here by the way ("Wiki Statistics" on the right side).

The community contributors of Technet Wiki enjoy sharing their knowledge with others. The community keeps Technet Wiki moving, and Wiki keeps community members informed. If anyone finds a typo, or incorrect content, then any member can modify the page. If members find a spam article (yes, posting is still free), then they mark it, and the admins will take care of that. The Wiki pages have their unique lifecycle - spam posts will have an end as well, the rest will be improved.

Technet Wiki is easy to search. And it's easy to create a new article. Just try it. Everyone is welcome to improve any content.