Think of the TN Wiki as like an airport. There are a lot of different people there, moving through the airport with purpose, on the way to many different destinations. However, there is a certain decorum and consideration that we all must pay to each other and to the rules, or the whole thing breaks down. Then none of us can get to our destinations.
These contribution guidelines are those "rules". If you were at our airport, we'd expect you to:
Be nice. Contribute boldly, edit gently!
You must sign-in to contribute. You must join to sign in. To learn how to join, see Wiki: How to Join.
The fastest way to get started is to click on a tag that indicates someone is looking for your help. For example, needs work, or stub.
The easiest way to get started is to contribute a link to one of the survival guides.
This is not the wiki you are looking for if you are a consumer or want to write for the consumer audience. However, the boundaries of "IT Pro content" are fuzzy. For example, articles about scripts, which are of interest to both IT pros and developers, but owned exclusively by neither, is welcome.
Wikipedia's experience is that most articles start out as stubs or outlines. Feel free to start these, and then recruit technical writers, reviewers, editors and illustrators to help you co-create the content. Tag these with "needs work" or " stub".
Content that exists to advertise something is not allowed and will be deleted.
See Wiki: Types of Articles Not Appropriate for TechNet Wiki
"When editing a page, main namespace articles should not be signed, because the article is a shared work, based on the contributions of many people, and one editor should not be singled out above others." (Source: Wikipedia: Signatures). Don't use a signature or greetings, use 3rd person, More information here : Wiki: User Experience Guidelines
If you are working on material that started on a 3rd party blog, another website or any other source, it is important to link to the original material at the top of the article.
Copy/pasting content and then saving under your name without proper source reference, is plagiarism. We frown on that here. Violations of copyright will be deleted.
Clearly indicate the version of the product when it is important.
Do not post content about products that are under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) or that are not publicly available.
Do not post information about pre-release content. The place to participate in the pre-release process for Microsoft products is Microsoft Connect.
Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word or PowerPoint will likely result in formatting problems. See the formatting section below for more specific instructions. We recommend authoring offline in a native HTML editor of your choice, and then pasting from there.
The maximum-width of an image in a wiki article is 600 pixels. Please re-size any images that you want to share that are larger than 600 pixels.
Please follow the wiki style guidelines, using templates can be a big help.
If you're not paying attention to the other people who talk about the same stuff you do, then your content won't be successful.
If you've come up with incredibly clever taglines, fantastic copy, and informative posts that perfectly embody everything you are and you honestly think everyone else will love it, too, because you took so much time doing it... but you don't verify that with anyone else, then your content won't be successful.
Consider readers who are not native English speakers - by following How to Write for an International Audience, you can dramatically increase your potential reach.
If you have questions, or would like to collaborate with someone from Microsoft on some wiki content, just post a request in the wiki forum.
When editing raw HTML refer toW3Schools.com for appropriate HTML syntax and use the "Try it yourself" feature to render raw HTML to preview how it will be displayed.
Entering [ [Publishing Guidelines] ] (without spaces between the brackets) in the wiki editor page will generate a link to this page. If the named page does not exist it will be created. By default new links are created as sub-pages to the page where the link is created. If the page exists elsewhere in the wiki then the link should point there unless the user specifies a subpage link. (See below) <need Telligent verification here>
The URLs for wiki articles can be referred to either by the full URL or as a partial URL. Linking from the wiki is as simple as using basic HTML linking or the editor's link button to generate a new link. Links external to the wiki are indicated in wiki articles with a graphic, like this:
You cannot attach files. You can link to videos you have posted elsewhere, to scripts on the Script Center Gallery, and to files you have uploaded to other servers such as SkyDrive and Flickr.
If you did not create it (such as a screenshot from your computer) then add a link to the source (Be Nice)
Tags are similar to keywords and are included in the search index, but are not displayed to the reader of the content. At least one tag is required for all new content created.
Do not delete personal tags or tags that are used in multiple articles, even if you think they are wrong. Add your own tags instead. For example, if you find some useful content tagged as "HyperV," do not delete these and replace them with "Hyper-V". Just add your "Hyper-V" tags to the tagstream. Someone tagged it with "HyperV" for a reason important to them, and is counting on using that tag to find the article.
But If you see tags that are only used once, then you can consider converting them.
Please add a tag for the language in which your post was written. For English, add en-US. This assists members of the community to easily locate and filter articles written in English.
Tip: don't forget to tag yourself while authoring a new article (and not while making edits) - this way you can easily access all articles that you originally authored.
Use standard formatting commands, such as <h1>, <h1>, etc.. All the formatting is done via style sheets (both for print and screen).
The title of the article is stored separately and is used for the <title> tag, breadcrumbs, side-bar navigation, and most importantly the URL.
In the above example the title of the article is How-To Contribute. The URL is https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/how-to-contribute.aspx. If you change the article title to "Wiki: How to Contribute", the URL will change, but the links will all go to the new URL. Title capitalization is preferred (most all words start with a capital lever, except most prepositions and articles like "the").
There is no Table of Contents for the wiki. Feel free to create a mini-TOC for a long article. To add an automatic TOC to your article, simply type the letters "toc"(without the quotes) between two square brackets (see the top of this article for an example).
How to Create Quick and Basic Tables for TechNet Wiki
When an article is longer than just a section or two, it could be useful inserting the "Return to top" links at the end of each section. Kurt L Hudson explained how you can add this feature to your Wiki article in a post on the WikiNinjas Official Blog.
If you accidentally publish a duplicate article, or have a good reason to want to remove an article, you cannot do it yourself. Only an administrator can physically remove an article. Instead, you have to change the article title and content, and replace the tags with:
...as explained in the Wiki: How to Report a TechNet Wiki Page.
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