Putting a face on the TN Wiki community

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The intention of a Wiki Community Win article is to provide an example of great collaboration. Instead of pointing to a specific Wiki article, I want to take a moment and discuss how Wiki Ninja interviews put a face to the TN Wiki Community and thereby add real value to collaboration.

As a side note, I’ve found that “collaboration” is a popular word in Microsoft technology (especially in the various SharePoint technologies).  For me, this took some time to get used to. I grew up disliking this word, in the Netherlands the term “collaboration” got tainted during World War II and in fact means “working together with the enemy” (see  https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboratie, Dutch only and https://www.history.co.uk/explore-history/ww2/collaboration-and-resistance.html). This is a huge difference to the term as currently described by Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration; here collaboration only means working together to achieve a goal.

History lesson is over. Let’s see how Wiki Ninja interviews put a face on the TN Wiki Community. For example, take my Wiki blog post “The Big Bang” metaphor (https://blogs.technet.com/b/wikininjas/archive/2012/06/17/the-big-bang-metaphor.aspx)... I noticed a nice comment by Fernando Lugao Veltem. Now, I saw his name before, but that was all. So, as a first step, I’ve checked out his profile and find out that he’s heavily involved in TN Wiki, and that I don’t speak enough Spanish to understand what he’s doing. Things become clearer after reading his interview (https://blogs.technet.com/b/wikininjas/archive/2012/01/02/interview-with-a-windows-server-and-exchange-mcc-wiki-ninja-fernando-lug-227-o-veltem.aspx). Now I know a lot more about him, such as that he lives in Brazil and can be trusted with your server park.

To me, this is what brings life to a virtual community. Getting to know your peers a little bit better makes it more fun to participate and lowers the barrier for contributing to the Wiki pages of others, and therefore the entire brand of TN Wiki Interviews is my example of great collaboration.