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Developer Content Wiki - MSDN Wiki

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Other than Sandcastle my team owns the release of MSDN Wiki beta and it's feature enhancements.

During TechEd 2006 we launched MSDN Wiki Beta. At this site you can add content to VS 2005 documentation topics and edit contributions from other users. Our goal is to extend the documentation with code examples, tips and tricks, and other information that you add.

We provide fully-localized documentation in 8 core languages but realize that there are a number of communities that are not served by this. In order to serve these communities we now offer a machine translated wiki (Translation Wiki) and let local users improve the translation. This gives us the ability to move into new areas and to seek community involvement

The Brazilian Portuguese “translation wiki” is one of the projects that falls under the “MSDN Wiki” umbrella, but it’s really separate from the work we’re doing in English and the languages for which we provide fully-localized documentation and products.

Here’s what we’re providing right now, and what we’re planning for the future:

English – MSDN Wiki v1 Beta – A Community Content section is added to each documentation topic. Customers can add and edit code examples, tips and tricks, and other content that extends the Microsoft-authored documentation. Customers cannot edit the Microsoft-authored documentation.

The community content feature will be expanded to cover many of the other VS core languages (languages in which we provided fully localized VS and .NET Framework products and documentation -- French, Italian, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese) by the end of the calendar year.

Brazilian Portuguese – MSDN Wiki and Translation Wiki v1 Beta – We’re using the translation wiki functionality to expand into new languages for which we don’t provide fully-localized products or documentation. In the current beta, we’re providing content that is machine translated from English into Brazilian Portuguese. The content is published in a wiki so that readers can edit it to improve the translation. This is the first time we’ve ever provided VS and .NET Framework documentation in Brazilian Portuguese. These topics also include the “Community Content” section that is available on English topics at the msdnwiki.microsoft.com domain. Ideally we’d like people to keep the Brazilian content as close in meaning to the English content as possible, and to add their own notes and code examples to the community content section.

The response to the English beta on msdnwiki.microsoft.com has been extremely positive, but the most common request we’ve gotten is that we add other doc sets and languages to the MSDN Wiki site. Based on this feedback, MSDN is working to migrate the community content feature to their main site so that it can be expanded to the entire library, including other localized version of the Whidbey documentation in MSDN2 by the end of this calendar year. At that time the English community content added on the msdnwiki.microsoft.com site will be migrated to the main MSDN Library site, and the English content will be removed from the msdnwiki site. The translation wiki docs will remain on the msdnwiki site as a separate beta project.

I will provide more details about this project in future blogs. I will be interested in hearing your comments. Cheers.

Anand..

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