SQLServerPedia

As Editor-in-Chief at SQLServerPedia, one of my jobs is to check out what other wikis are doing, see how it’s working for them, and steal their ideas apply their knowledge.  We used to try nominating an Article of the Month every month, but frankly, that just wasn’t working.  People told me they don’t like to jump start articles all by themselves.  So how do the big boys grow wiki articles?

Every month, Wikitravel.org chooses a single article to be the Collaboration of the Month.  Authors focus their efforts on making this one article better, and then the following month, that article is featured as the Destination of the Month.  It’s been really successful for them – read the comments about their 2009 collaborations, and check out how the editors celebrate the contributions from different authors.

Love it!  I added a SQLServerPedia Collaboration of the Month page to focus on a different article each month.  The page lists a number of ways you can contribute information.  Our goal is to keep each bullet point to a minimum amount of work so that you can knock out a bullet point in an hour or two of work and raise your hands in victory.

For February, we’re focusing on the Wait Types article.  Jason Strate (Blog – @StrateSQL) asked if he could help flesh out that article because there’s not a good repository for waits out there.  I needed the exact same information for next month’s virtual training event.  Presto – I love it when a plan comes together.

How You Can Help Right Now

Here’s our goals for the Wait Types article:

• Add skeleton pages for each wait type by copy/pasting our wait types template
• Flesh out skeleton pages whenever possible – some wait types are just complete unknowns right now, but some are fairly well understood (think CXPACKET)
• Merge content from the other Wait Events articles into the Wait Types article – we’d rather have a single well-written article than a few fragments on the topic
• Add queries in the T-SQL code library to check waits

Contributed content doesn’t have to be an exclusive at SQLServerPedia – if you’ve already written something and you’d like to copy some of that material into the wiki post, we’d love the help.  Please email me first at Brent.Ozar@Quest.com before you copy any material, though, because I have to make sure you’re the rightful owner.  I can’t have people copy/pasting somebody else’s work, and I’ll want to keep your email on file giving us permission to use the content.

I know it’s intimidating, but you – yes, you – are qualified to edit the wiki! Get yourself an account at SQLServerPedia, and there’s an Edit button at the top of every single page.  Here’s a few links to help get you started:

• How to Help at SQLServerPedia – includes a ten-minute video on how to create articles.
• How to Format Text and Pictures – if you want to make your work look all fancy-like.
• How to Review Pages – includes the bare minimum standards for public articles.

And I hate to have to say this, but please don’t email me a list of changes for a wiki article.  I love you, every single one of you, but I’m not your secretary.  The magic of the wiki is that anybody can contribute, and you are anybody.

How SQLServerPedia Helps You Back

If you’ve written a great blog post about the Collaboration of the Month topic, or if you’ve been thinking about writing one, now’s your chance – add it to the Related Reading section of the article.  After the one-month blitz finishes for the Collaboration of the Month, we’ll feature that article prominently in a webcast or podcast.  This is a chance to bring a lot of new eyeballs to your blog.

We can’t feature every single post on the article, unfortunately, and the Editors reserve the right to prune that list.  We’d like to keep it to 5 related blog posts per article, and we’ll favor wiki contributors over those who haven’t contributed.

Finally, I’d like to give something back to the contributors.  I already know what kinds of prizes you want to win, but I need your help figuring out how to give a prize away each month as part of the Collaboration of the Month.  Do we do a random drawing from everyone who contributed to the article?  Do we try to judge the most valuable contribution?

New at SQLServerPedia – Collaboration of the Month is a post from: Brent Ozar - Too Much Information.
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