December 15, 2006

MSDN Wiki

Have you noticed the new Community Content sections on msdn2 documentation?

These new sections are part of the MSDN Wiki project, live on MSDN2 documentation. [1]

Community Content

Community Content is not intended to be a forum or discussion area, nor is it meant to be a place to report bugs or issues. Its purpose is for developers to collaborate through the extension of MSDN documents. Anyone can add their own tips and tricks, or simply provide extra information about a given topic if it will add value, which will then be available to anyone reading the online documentation. [2]

Participate!

To participate, simply find any MSDN2 document that has a Community Content section at the bottom and click the Add new Community Content link. Read and agree to the terms and conditions including the Code of Conduct [2], enter your display name and you're all set. (Note: You need a Windows Live ID to sign up.)

A Contributor's Rights to Their Content

The following FAQs are excerpts from [3]:

Can I reuse the content I contribute to the wiki in other publications (for example, a book or a magazine article)?  Can I reuse the code I contribute in my commercial applications?

Yes, and yes!  As described above, we do not ask for ownership of contributions of content or code.  Instead, the Contribution Agreement gives us a non-exclusivelicense to contributions.  As a result, you are free to reuse your own content or code however you like.

Who owns the rights to content I add to MSDN Wiki?  What does the contribution agreement mean?  

Although many collaborative development projects ask for assignment of ownership by contributors, we decided that you should own your own contributions.  The Contribution Agreement gives us a non-exclusivelicense to your contributions.

My Contributions So Far...

I recently added Designing Thread-safe Events in C# to the Event Design guidelines documentation since it didn't mention thread-safety anywhere. I also added a chart (a poorly-formatted one since MSDN doesn't allow table elements) to the UriComponents Enumeration document to illustrate the behavior of each flag. You can review all of my posts and edits at my public user profile on MSDN [4].

Feedback

Submit feedback about MSDN Wiki or view the feedback of others, including bug reports and suggestions at Microsoft Connect [5].

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References

[1] MSDN Wiki RC0 Details
https://connect.microsoft.com/content/content.aspx?ContentID=996&SiteID=112

[2] MSDN Wiki -- Code of Conduct
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/communitycodeofconduct.aspx

[3] MSDN Community Content FAQ
§ Legal Framework
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/communitymsdnwikifaq.aspx

[4] Public User Profile: Dave Sexton
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/user-dave%20sexton.aspx

[5] Feedback, MSDN Wiki
https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=112

As always, I'd love to hear from anyone that has something to say about this post.  Drop me a comment.

.NET | C# | msdn | wiki