Community Win: dsforum2wiki - Help me unlock the mystery of the great content migration from the Windows Server DS forum to TechNet Wiki!!!
Welcome to Community Win Thursday, where we discuss an amazing achievement of intense collaboration in the TechNet Wiki community!
Today this is like a journal. We're going to be investigating the mysterious "dsforum2wiki" effort, what it means, where it came from, and how it got to be so successful.
5/17/2012 - 6:24 PM (PST)
First I'll explain it. I've written before about the potential value of repurposing forum thread answers for TechNet Wiki... So that people can land on a page and get a to-do list rather than surfing the thread looking for the golden nugget. I also created a Wiki tag that bucketizes all the articles created from Forum threads... the "From Forum" tag.
However, this dsforum2wiki effort has to be the largest organized effort to do that very practice.
Who started the dsforum2wiki effort? Where's it headed? The truth is that you're not going to get that from my original post. You'll have to come back to this page, because I'll update it like a journal as I get more answers. Each time I update, I'll put the date and time stamp on it like above so that you can track it.
Let me give you an example...
As you can see, that article comes from this forum post here:
These dsforum2wiki articles contain the tag in the title (dsforum2wiki). And then the dsforum2wiki TechNet Wiki tag (which acts like a category) is full of all these articles:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/tags/dsforum2wiki/default.aspx
There are now many authors doing this (turning dsforum topics into Wiki articles).
That begs the questions...
- Who started this?
- How did they get it to become so successful?
5/18/2012 - 10:08 AM (PST)
This morning I got an alert about Kurt Hudson's comment below. He said, "Davanand Bahall came up with the idea and coordinated the initial efforts. The three original people to do this where: Davanand, Justin Hall, and me. :-) I think it is awesome that it was picked up and carried forward."
Thanks Kurt! That's a good start to unlocking this mystery. I'll ping Kurt, Davanand, and Justin to get more insight on the steps they took. Ultimately, this sort of approach should be modeled across the Microsoft forums. The hunt continues...
5/18/2012 - 4:25 PM (PST)
Kurt and Davanand informed me of their process. Devanand sorted the forum by the threads with the most views. Then he manually captured that in a list that they could come back to. He then worked with Kurt and Justin to build out a process and template for the content. Then they went through the list and got through about 40 of the articles. As they seeded the content, the community also began to respond and do similar things.
So did you do anything to evangelize the process to the community? Thanks!
5/19/2012 - 1:13 PM (PST)
Michael left the comment below, "Davanand had the forethought to formalize the process and create a great pipeline to help writers get ideas for writing wiki articles based on forum questions/threads. I am hopeful more people will "mine" forums and blogs for wiki article ideas, and Davanand and I are currently including his process in an "all-up" community strategy for WS iX."
Well Michael and Davanand, you've got a great thing going. Keep it up! If you can get a process with a team, goals, and accountability going, then that would be fantastic! It's the kind of thing that the other teams should model as well.
Thank you!
The Wiki mystery is no longer afoot. (Now it's at hand.)
- Ninja Ed