Microsoft Wades Into Wiki Waters

Microsoft went live this week with MSDN Wiki, a new site inviting developers to contribute their own tips and code examples to run alongside Microsoft's official Visual Studio and .Net Framework documentation.

The wiki is the first step in what Microsoft developer division head S. "Soma" Somasegar cast as a broad rethinking of Microsoft's approach to developer documentation.

"We want your feedback about where the project should go next. How important is it that Microsoft provides an official version of the docs that cannot be altered by the community?" Somasegar wrote Thursday in his blog. "This is the start of a shift in the process we use to write and publish our developer documentation, and we need your help to determine what approach we should take."

Microsoft has seeded MSDN Wiki with content pulled directly from its Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Library, essentially duplicating portions of that site. Content posted by MSDN Wiki contributors currently appears beneath the traditional documentation, akin to a blog comment.

Right now, MSDN Wiki focuses only on Visual Studio 2005 and .Net Framework 2.0 documentation, but Microsoft is considering extending the wiki functionality to all content published on MSDN, according to project manager Molly Bostic.Early response to MSDN from participants is guardedly enthusiastic, though critics already have a few quibbles about the set-up. Technical writer Tim Anderson questiond Microsoft's decision to separate its wiki from its standard MSDN documentation pages.

"If I can see the same documentation, but with comments added by other developers or by the Microsoft team, why [would] I ever want to visit the old-style site?," he wrote on his blog.

MSDN Wiki is another sign of Microsoft's efforts to better connect with the developer community by adopting tools and techniques that have gained grassroots popularity. Somasegar is pushing Microsoft to be more transparent in its development, inviting outside comment on fledgling products as they progress through frequent "community technology preview" (CTP) build drops. For Orcas, the code-named next incarnation of Visual Studio, Somasegar says he would like to have a community dialogue about every planned specification Microsoft considers.

Still, Microsoft's sensibilities are regularly at odds with those of open development evangelists. One of the most famous wikis, Wikipedia, invites anyone to edit text without registering and logging in with the site. MSDN Wiki requires content contributors to sign in with a Microsoft Passport or Windows Live ID, and it isn't yet letting contributors amend the main body of its documentation. Similarly, when Microsoft launched a beta version of its new shared-source development side, CodePlex, it immediately rankled some users by announcing it wouldn't openly release the code used to create the CodePlex site.