Scott Swigart started
this off with his post about undocumentation;Jeff
Atwood picked that up and suggested
Wikis in his post, which has generated some follow-up comments. I dislike
wikis, mainly because the community which is supposed to contribute is generally too
busy or apathetic to do so, and that makes them next to useless. Take, for instance,
the dasBlog Wiki,
in particluar http://wiki.shahine.com/default.aspx/DasBlog/ReleaseNotesOnePointSeven.html.
It's not to say that Omar and Scott aren't putting out a great app--they are, and
it's truly wonderful. But the release notes are a minor version behind.
Most wikis-as-software-documentation that I've seen usually end up like this.
Rather than Wikis, or moderated comments, or whatever, I think we could already use
the tools we have at hand--our blogs. All Microsoft would need to do is add
an RSS filtersimilar to Memeorandum or Blogniscientto
the bottom of a KB article or method documentation, and interested parties could easiliy
see any additional comments, examples, etc. in the blogosphere.
On our end, tag your posts. You can find some tagging information at http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html.
Basically, a tag is a link with rel="tag" added to it. I suggest making the
HREF link back to the KB article or MSDN documentation page, and using the KB article
ID or the full namespace declaration as the tag's text.
Think about it--if you have a namespace or particluar method you need to follow, you
could set up a search at Blogdigger, and subscribe
to the RSS results. There's probably an MS Live gadget in the future as well.
Finding relevant commentary would be significantly easier for newbies, and presentation
or results could be finely tuned by advanced users.
