Weekend Surprise: Inside out, a peak under the hood of TNWiki Governance. Keep out-of-sight!

In my previous article (Medic! We need a Wiki Ninja medic! ... The dissection of the ideal TNWiki article.) I highlighted some tips & techniques to make your article shine...

With this sunday surprise I would like to give you some insights on the other side of the medal..., because this is what the daily Wiki governance operations are about.

And you can't always see the backside of the medal, nor will you always be able to see the work that the Wiki Governance team is doing.
But just to give you an idea: on the TNWiki we have 6100+ deleted articles (spam, test articles, pirated, duplicated, obsoleted, old, ... content), that's about 30% of the published content.
And still counting...

So, if you do your job as a good Wiki Ninja, you keep out of sight and can enjoy the eternal fame...

But what are the typical actions and items to get in the line of fire?

First of all there are a bunch of the obvious usual suspects:

  1. Publishing spam
  2. Publishing marketing
  3. Pirated content
  4. Non-Microsoft related content

AsĀ stipulated by the Community Rules, these type of articles are removed immediately without warning.

But there is more...
The TechNet Wiki (just like the Forums, BlogsĀ and other community platforms) has a set of guidelines and rules, which govern the operations.

And, by accident or by explicit will of the author, the violations below happen quite frequently.

  1. Questions
  2. Blog style posting
  3. SPOV (Single point of view) vs BPOV (Balanced Point of view), explained here: Wiki: Roles
  4. Personalization: https://aka.ms/wikipersonalization
  5. Articles without valuable content, 1-liners, ... (https://aka.ms/NotForTNWiki)
  6. Video posting without additional content ( https://aka.ms/Wiki_Video )

In case the violation can be corrected, without destroying the article, the Wiki community and the administrators will try to fix the article.
For example, removing signatures, converting personal opinions into 'reviews'...

But when the article cannot be fixed, or if the violation is very explicit and obvious, even by accident, these articles will be deleted.

What are the rules and guidelines that govern the Wiki maintenance? There is a lot of key material on the Wiki, but you can start with:

So, a small but important piece of advice from the Wiki Governance Team: take some time, just now and then, to read through these guidelines and keep clear.
Because it's not a good sign when you get in to the cross hair.