Tag Those Posts About KB Articles, Methods and Properties

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 filter similar to Memeorandum or Blogniscient to 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.