TNWiki Community Council: Blast to the Past - 4/1/2010 (Landing Page, Plagiarism, CSS, and more)

  • Article

This is a new series for us to take a look at where the Community Council was back in 2010 (using Wiki: Archive of Meeting Minutes for the Community Council)...

    

4/1/2010

  • The landing page. Must simplify this page. It should be just a short paragraph about what the site is for and what we expect from you the reader. It should also contain information about how to search, how to edit, how to create, and the code of conduct. We should link to the wiki vision at the bottom. Kim to draft and we will send out on forum for review 
  • TechEd 2010 - The remaining council members. Especially if we get a slot at TechEd, we should make a strong showing. Kim, Tony, Eric are attending already so far. Booth is open 10 hours a day, so we need staffing. All council members: Think of others who can staff the booth. (Mail Ninjas?) Monica to talk to Ed Hickey; Kim to contact Kevin Beares for MVP ideas for the council and TechEd
  • Launch celebration (internal to Microsoft) : Around 4/17. Brooke to arrange and advertise. Eric to look into the cost of “throwing stars” as a little give-away
  • Plagiarism: All: Review the code of conduct, esp. plagiarism. Will discuss important entries for the code of conduct next week. A way to avoid plagiarism generally should be to summarize content and link to it; not copy. This strategy moves us toward better link attribution
  • CSS (Customer Support Services) : Monica, Larry working on long-term participation. Monica setting up meeting with GM (General Manager) in CSS soon and will invite council
  • Announcing the council: Monica to create council topic. Will contain charter, meeting minutes, and requests for agenda items. Eric will send out link to topic with announcement mail
  • Boilerplate text to announce wiki: Short paragraph people can use any place, anytime to promote the wiki (and modify where necessary) Volunteers?

 ========================

  

Here's the update on these topics...

   

The Landing Page:  Originally the home page was an introduction to TechNet Wiki. It was this page (without the videos; those were added later): Wiki: About TechNet Wiki. At the time, Gerard (who was on the council) was suggesting a list of links to portals (like what you see on Wikipedia and WikiMedia), so Gerard mocked up these pages (Draft Homepage, Draft Homepage 2), and I sold the idea of linking to the portals:.

We last updated the home page in a major way in 2012, with the TechNet design change. I made minor changes in 2013... adding the Governance & Guidelines Portal and adding the Engage section on the right (with Wiki Ninjas Blog (Announcements), Wiki Ninjas on Twitter, and TechNet Wiki Discussion Forum), 

 

TechEd 2010:  We showed up there and got some buzz going, but not a ton. The main responses were that they hadn't heard of TechNet Wiki and that they didn't feel qualified to contribute. Really? People from TechEd weren't qualified? As if!!! Regardless, we managed to get over that initial hump, we've been at many events since then, and we're looking to get TechNet Wiki presented at more events and user group meetings.

  

Launch Celebration:  I don't think much came of this, but the throwing stars idea would be a lot of fun!

  

Plagiarism: The council made some good progress with some basic guidelines. Peter Geelen and I wrote up those guidelines into a basic process here: Wiki User Guide: Handling Abuse and Wiki: How to Report a TechNet Wiki Page. Today, Peter leads our Plagiarism efforts with Naomi, Richard, Carsten, and others supporting them. This is Focus Area #5; see TechNet Wiki Community Council: Areas of Focus.

   

CSS: This push to involve more Field members at Microsoft led to some splintered efforts. Currently this is Brent's focus area (#14, TechNet Wiki Community Council: Areas of Focus). 

   

Announcing the Council: Announcing the council was a normal occurrence. Back in 2010, it started with Monica creating this page: TechNet Wiki Community Council. I followed it up in 2011 to capture the changing membership better: TechNet Wiki Community Council Members. The modern version of this is that we now run this Thursday blog post series (Thursday - Council Spotlight) where we focus on the good works of the Community Council (in addition to various other posts on this blog). So now we report out to the world about the council at least once a week.

  

Boilerplate Text to Announce the Wiki: You can find the text Eric wrote here.

Thank you for joining me in this blast to the past!

   - Ninja Ed