Top Contributors of the Week: ForeFront TMG, MS Dynamics CRM 2011, Windows Server 2012 Essentials & Japanese Translations

Firstly, here is a snapshot of the week's Top Contributors, as presented on the Wiki articles summary page:

Ed has retaken his crown from Fernando, so all is well in the world again.

This is from Friday night, because when this blog goes live, I will be out - watching Muse at the London 02 :D

"TechNet Wiki: Together we're Invincible " (awesome video)

 

Digging deeper

From that list, it's hard to see what the actual contributions are, unless we go crawling through people's profile updates, and then it is unclear which are major contributions or just tweaks, without checking each one manually.

 

So I decided to try and automate a deeper examination of [firstly] just the article updates, from the Updated Pages wiki feature. Something that would give me a better snapshot view of actual changes.

 

I have started developing a wiki crawler specifically designed to pull out the change information from the "revision compare" feature of all TechNet Wiki articles.

 

This week I show you what I have been able to achieve, after a couple of nights' fun coding.

 

I scan through the Updated Pages list, for a week's worth of entries (109 articles have been modified this week). I then pull down each "change compare" page (comparing to the previous revision) and scan through the HTML for the change markers. Finally, I produce thumbnail images for each article, showing the green and red from additions and deletions in each article.

(click image for larger readable version)

From this, I can easily see which article has had the most work on, at a glance.

Also, because these are all reduced to the same height, a thinner image means a longer document, so again I can also spot which are big contributions.

Having said that, I'm sure our sponsors would like me to make it clear that size isn't important!

 

The only problem with this "first attempt" of scanning, is the Updated Pages feature only shows the LAST update for each article that has been updated this week. It isn't a total of the week's contributions to each article, which of course could be from different people, or the last update may have been just a tweak compared to the previous updates.

 

Hopefully, I'll refine it further over the following weeks.

Meanwhile, here are a few highlights from that list above...

 

The Week's Highlights

Highlighted in my scan are changes by yottun8 to  this translation  by Luciano Lima [MVP] Brazil of the How To Contribute Content To TechNet Wiki page.

If you look at that revision change page, there are definitely some good changes in there, but there are also a lot of "same word" change highlights, with no noticable change.

I think this is a bug in the compare feature, as it seems to be mostly accented words that are highlighted?

This is one of several articles that  yottun8 has been translating to Japanese, tweaking and adding a link in the other languages section, like here. A valuable service that has rightfully put yottun8 in third place for contributions this week.

 

Another noteworthy contribution was a bunch of new images from dodeitte to Fernando Lugão Veltem's   Configuring ForeFront TMG 2010 as Reverse Proxy for Lync Server 2010  

Here is an example of contributors working together. Jukka Niiranen added some valuable additions to Wayne Walton's   Update Rollup 11 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011  the day after he published it.

Also this week, Joon84 has been busily working on a new article called  CRM 2011 performance (for roll ups less than 10) : why search on some default views with non admin role is too slow

One final highlight from many great contributions this week is Windows Server 2012 Essentials: Router Setup by Susan Bradley MVP, copied in and tidied for a new wiki audience.

Thank you Susan, Joon84, Jukka, dodeitte, yottun8 and everyone else who contributed this week.

 

 

As my analyses improves, I hope to dig deeper in future posts.
Once perfected, I hope to port it from my Windows 7 app to the TechNet Wiki Widget (Windows 8) so you can all see for yourselves.

 

Regards,
Pete Laker

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