Council Spotlight: Demystifying the TechNet Guru Judge System

Do you know how at the end of the Wizard of Oz, they lift the curtain and see the dorky guy projecting his big head (if you didn't, you do now)?

 

Well we're looking past Peter's big head (projected, of course) to take a look at the inner workings of the TechNet Guru Judge System!

See the full article here:

TechNet Guru Competition: Judge System Explanation

 

Here are some excerpts from that article:

Introduction

The TechNet Guru Competition is a monthly contest. Each month people who post an article to TechNet Wiki can propose their article for consideration in that month's awards. The top three articles each month win a "virtual" gold, silver or bronze award. Winners are promoted across the community in forums, blogs and interviews. Winning a Guru medal also contributes towards TechNet Wiki Ninja Belts.

The competition is split over a number of categories. Each category has at least 2-4 specialist Microsoft employees or MVPs who are experts in that category, as well as 2-3 TechNet Wiki Community Council members. Therefore each category has between 5 and eight judges. The MS experts and MVPs assess the technical content of the article. The Wiki Councillors are also judging content, but they also looking at the format, layout, readability and design of the article.

How it works

Each month, a new Wiki page is posted, where contributors add a link to their articles. Contributors edit the article, adding a new bullet line containing a hyperlinked reference to the article and author, in their selected category list of contributions.

The Import Tool

I have developed a WPF tool which crawls the contributions Wiki page and extracts the articles, authors and links for each category. Once I confirm the import data, it uploads the data to an SQL database in Azure.

The Judge Tool

I have developed a Silverlight application that feeds from a WCF service of a website on Azure, which also feeds from the same contributions database as above.

Comments are very important feedback for the contributors, both good and bad. We hope judges can find the time to add at least a few words for each article. We also ask judges not to write too much, as we have to collate all the comments into one response area of the results blog.

Okay. I'll stop there. This blog post just gives you a little taste.

Go here to read the whole thing and experience its awesomeness:

TechNet Guru Competition: Judge System Explanation

Thanks to XAML Guy for hosting the best contest on the face of the planet!

   - Ninja Ed