Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.

First up, the weekly leader board snapshot...

A slightly quieter week, this week. Which of course means some new names bubble up to the daylight!

Congratulations to Bob, Peter & Durval for keeping the wheels of the Wiki rolling, and to Chen again for still topping the monthly new articles tally.

As always, here are the results of another weekly crawl over the updated articles feed.

Most Revisions Award   Who has made the most individual revisions

#1 Durval Ramos with 54 revisions.

#2 Muhammad Ehsan with 52 revisions.

#3 Sandro Pereira with 48 revisions.

Just behind the winners but also worth a mention are:
 

#4 Matthew Yarlett with 41 revisions.

#5 Shanky_621 with 40 revisions.

#6 Benoit Jester - MTFC with 30 revisions.

#7 Bob Blork with 28 revisions.

#8 Naomi N with 18 revisions.

#9 ThomasECanter with 17 revisions.

#10 YahyaZahedi with 16 revisions.

Most Articles Updated Award   Who has updated the most articles

#1 Durval Ramos with 35 articles.

#2 Muhammad Ehsan with 26 articles.

#3 Benoit Jester - MTFC with 19 articles.

Just behind the winners but also worth a mention are:
 

#4 Shanky_621 with 17 articles.

#5 Matthew Yarlett with 12 articles.

#6 Sandro Pereira with 12 articles.

#7 Bob Blork with 10 articles.

#8 Falah Nabeel with 8 articles.

#9 Nonki Takahashi with 7 articles.

#10 Ed Price - MSFT with 5 articles.

Most Updated Article Award   Largest amount of updated content in a single article

The article to have the most change this week was Operations Manager Management Pack Authoring - Dashboards, by Brian Wren

This week's reviser was Brian Wren

First up this week, an example of excessive pruning :) 
Brian has taken his article and severely trimmed it down to what it is now. This is a fine example of how the Wiki is living breathing content.
Always relevant. Always ready. Thanks Brian for your continued attention to your Wiki articles.

Longest Article Award   Biggest article updated this week

This week's largest document to get some attention that I've pcked for glory is Authentication using Facebook, Google and Microsoft account in WP8.0 App (MVVM), by saramgsilva

This week's revisers were Shanky_621, Sandro Pereira & saramgsilva

This is a last minute entry into May's TechNet Guru Competition, and a very strong contender it is too.
This is full of win, from the premise, to the solution, and page layout.
Good luck saramgsilva, this deserves a medal in my opinion, but each category has up to six judges from Microsoft, TechNet Wiki and MVPs

There are often so many high calibre entries into the Guru competitions, it is often a shame we can only give three medals.
For this reason we may at some time consider doing something with all the entries again, in future initiatives.

Most Revised Article Award   Article with the most revisions in a week

This week's most fiddled with article is TechNet Guru Contributions for May 2014, by XAML guy. It was revised 29 times last week.

Always a winner, May has been another bumper month of awesomeness.
Only the Visual Basic Gurus didn't show this month.

Therefore, I also highlight his week's second most fiddled with article is Minimum Security Rights for BizTalk Server 2013 R2, by ThomasECanter. It was revised 21 times last week.

<Cue fanfare...> New arrival from Thomas, who is also new to the community. However, his first post is very nice and drawing attention from others.

I also like how gracious he is in comments to those who help tweak his work. Someone who has clearly understood the philosophy and purpose of the Wiki.

Good luck Thomas, welcome and looking forward to more of the same. 

Most Popular Article Award   Collaboration is the name of the game!

The article to be updated by the most people this week is TechNet Guru Contributions for May 2014, by XAML guy

And the list of awesome collaborators this week is:

This week's revisers were João Eduardo Sousa, Mr X, Magnus (MM8), Hasham Niaz, Durval Ramos, Bob Blork, SubramanyamRaju.B, Sandro Pereira, Tomasso Groenendijk, Mahdi Tehrani, Mang Alex, Geetanjali Arora, Shanky_621, Muhammad Ehsan, Naomi N, Ravindar Thati, Dan Christian, Saad Mahmood, Steef-Jan Wiggers & Sarat Babu (SS)

The article to be updated by the SECOND most people this week is AAD Cloud App Discovery Preview - Changelog , by Nima Hashemi

This week's revisers were Nima Hashemi, Soren Dreijer, Markus Vilcinskas & Bob Blork

Regarding your comments Bob, Microsoft use the WIki for many things, this being one of them.

But don't worry, if you aren't looking for it, you won't find it :)

Ninja Edit Award   A ninja needs lightning fast reactions!

Below is a list of this week's fastest ninja edits. That's an edit to an article after another person

• Revision 2 of Application virtualization client could not launch the application you requested: SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2013. was saved by Muhammad Ehsan just 5 minutes after Benoit Jester - MTFC

  Congratulations Muhammad! Five minutes is a good win.
  Also in the top tenians...

• Revision 8 of SPAM_20140530 was saved by Testewede just 6 minutes after Durval Ramos
• Revision 6 of AAD Cloud App Discovery Preview - Changelog was saved by Nima Hashemi just 8 minutes after Markus Vilcinskas
• Revision 7 of SPAM_20140530 was saved by Durval Ramos just 12 minutes after Testewede
• Revision 19 of Small Basic: Color was saved by Bob Blork just 13 minutes after Nonki Takahashi
• Revision 1 of AAD Cloud App Discovery Preview - Changelog was saved by Bob Blork just 14 minutes after Nima Hashemi
• Revision 10 of SPAM_20140530 was saved by Durval Ramos just 16 minutes after Testewede
• Revision 1 of ASP.NET MVC 5 - Bootstrap 3.0 in 3 Steps was saved by Shanky_621 just 26 minutes after João Eduardo Sousa
• Revision 10 of Could Not Find Database Engine Startup Handle Error During SQL Server Installation was saved by Naomi N just 27 minutes after Shanky_621
• Revision 1 of Application virtualization client could not launch the application you requested: SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2013. was saved by Benoit Jester - MTFC just 34 minutes after Aulakh Amardeep- MVP SharePoint Server

A quiet week across the Wiki, but a busy Guru corner, as the month comes to a close.

I close the competition tomorrow, so ANY VB programmers out there could drop in something simple and nifty and win a medal! Guru wins will soon count towards Ninja Belts, so an easy win is always worth snatching!

Thanks for joining me again in celebration of the week's wonderful wiki work, and hope to see your name in next week's awards! 

Best regards,
Pete Laker

I just want to thank our Turkish and Portuguese teams for being awesome on their blogs!

Turkish: http://blogs.technet.com/b/wikininjastr/

Recent posts:

• TAT Team Social Networking & Sosyal Ağlardan Bağlantı Kurun by Mehmet PARLAKYİĞİT-TAT
• Wiki Life: User Pages - Kişisel kullanıcı sayfaları nedir ve ne işe yarar? by RecepYUKSEL
• TNWiki Article spotlight -VMware Sanallaştırma Altyapısının SCVMM ile Yönetilmesi by Hasan Dimdik
• Wiki Life: Eyvah Kayboldum ! by eerrsin

Great variety of bloggers and blog styles!

Portuguese: http://blogs.technet.com/b/wikininjasbr/

Select blog posts from the main four authors:

• Sexta-Feira - Atualização Internacional da Comunidade - Temos 2 notícias! by Durval Ramos
• Quarta-Feira - Wiki Life - Como usar o Technet Wiki? by Alan Nascimento Carlos
• Sexta-feira com Atualização Internacional da Comunidade - Artigos sobre Exchange Server 2010 da Turquia by Luciano Lima [MVP] Brazil
• Segunda-Feira - Entrevista com o Wiki Ninja Mauricio Junior by Hezequias Vasconcelos - MTFC thi

It's truly fantastic that we can offer blog posts like this that target these languages and that specific culture and group of people! Thank you to all our Turkish and Portuguese contributors!

   - Ninja Ed

So we've got the TechNet Guru Awards:

TechNet Guru Contributions

And then we have the Wiki Ninja Belt Rankings (which we're working to automate):

Wiki Ninja Belt Rankings

Should the Guru award medals be a requirement to complete certain belt rankings?

If so, which ones? What would the requirements be?

Think about the higher-end belts because those Guru medals aren't easy to get!!!

Thanks for your feedback!

   - Ninja Ed

How much time do you spend on setting good tags on an article, when you're putting together a new Wiki article, or when you are reviewing existing TNWiki articles?
Seconds, minutes?

Have you ever had some bizarre suggestions when you tried to add your tags to your article?
In this blog post I'll provide some insights in the world of TechNet Wiki tagging.
And I'll provide some practical hints and tips to get it done correctly...

How do tags work?

Check the description on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata).

"In information systems, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system."

Usually a tag is used to assign categories to the article, to group it, to ease search and to ease management of articles...
But how does that reflect to TechNet Wiki?

Facts and figures

Let me kick off with some numbers.
(Note: Please realize numbers can vary on a daily basis, so you get a snapshot of the statistics today, but the overall picture stays the same over time.)

How many articles do we have at TechNet Wiki?
16.000 + (Hint: see the TNWiki featured articles page.)

How many tags do we have at TNWiki?
18741 (and growing)

Yes, 18K+ tags!

For your information the TechNet Wiki sitemap has the list of ALL tags.

WARNING: It's an awful large document that takes quite some time to load. (I've warned you!)

So there is something wrong here, we have more tags than articles...
Using some powershell scripting and the Technet Wiki sitemap I've been analyzing the numbers.

Deep dive on TechNet Wiki tags

By default the TechNet Wiki is providing you with the most popular tags used, the TNWIKI Tag Cloud. (http://aka.ms/TNWikiTagCloud)

The tag cloud contains the TOP 100 of most used tags:

What's behind the TNWiki tag cloud?

Top 3 popular tags:

1. EN-US: 9840+ articles
2. Has Image: 4500+
3. Has TOC: 3400+ count

This top 100 does not count the hidden/deleted articles.

Just for your information, we have almost 5000 hidden/deleted articles, mostly spam, duplicates, violations of TOU (terms of use), and archived articles.

But there is more interesting stuff...

Top 10 Tag frequency graph

If you check out how frequent a tag is used, you'll get some astonishing numbers.

In short, we have 12295 tags, only used 1 time.
2292 tags have been used twice.

Tag's length

If you check the statistics on tag length, it's getting bizarre.

 The longest tag is 173 characters.
The shortest tag... is 1 char.

We got more than half of the articles with tags longer than 14 characters.
Here you see how the tag length is spread:

Number of words per tag

Tag Count	#Words in tag
5892	1
5573	2
3317	3
1383	4
755	5
419	6
258	7
168	8
112	9
68	10
64	11
50	12
25	13
23	14
10	15
15	16
12	17
10	18
2	19
1	20
5	21
4	22
3	23
1	24
1	25

If you want to analyse it yourself: I've shared the analysis data here (but can't guarantee a life-time availability).

TNWiki tags collection.xlsx

See also

If you need more help on using tags, check these resources:

• TechNet Wiki Tags
• Wiki: Common Tags
• TechNet Wiki: Technology Tags
• Wiki: How to Filter Tag Results by More than One Tag
• TechNet Wiki: Getting Started

Lessons learned

Back to the basics:

• keep it simple.
• The more you use a tag, the better they get.

Take aways: How to set tags properly

• The power of the tag is in being NON-UNIQUE
  • Re-use tags as much as possible
  • A tag used one time is useless; it will not be found.
  • A unique tag has no efficiency.
• Keep the tags short
  • Think of an article tag as a #hashtag
  • The less characters used, the better

• Keep the tag word count down
  • By preference 1 word or 2 word tags
  • Only use more words if REALLY necessary
• Check if there are similar tags in use already
• Better multiple re-usable good keywords that one long one-time tag

Hints:

• if you want to avoid the wrong tags being suggested in the Wiki editor: type your tag, and terminate with a comma.

I sincerely hope this helps you to be a better TechNet Wiki article writer, and to get more out of TNWiki.
Because using the tags properly is a responsibility we all need to take care of!

Congratulations to Nonki Takahashi for winning the Small Basic Technical Guru Gold Medal for April!

Nonki's cartoony self-portrait was made from a Paint-like program that he wrote himself, from Small Basic:

Here is his winning article:

History of Microsoft Small Basic

This is an interesting section from that article:

Books Published

2010-07-01	Beginning Microsoft Small Basic
2010-07-01	Computer Bible Games for Small Basic
2010-09-01	Developer's Reference Guide to Small Basic
2010-09	Basic Computer Games - Small Basic Edition
2011-06-15	はじめての Small Basic (Japanese)
2011-08-02	Small Basic fur Kids  (German)
2011-12-10	Small Basic で let's プログラミング (Japanese)
2011-12-31	David Ahl's Small Basic Computer Adv.
2013-02-18	Programming Home Projects with Small Basic
2013-02-18	Programming Games with Small Basic
2013-08-11	Computer Bible Games for Small Basic (Color Edition)
2013-11-20	Principles of Programming (using Small Basic)
2013-11-24	Teaching Kids to Program with Small Basic

And here are all the April winning articles for Small Basic...

Small Basic Technical Guru - April 2014

	Nonki	History of Microsoft Small Basic	RZ: "This is very impressive. Though not technical in nature, those are invaluable information!" Ed Price: "I'll jump in and comment but not vote (we had enough voting but not comments). This is a nice jump into the history of Small Basic! I sweetened it up a bit by adding the Blogs and Books sections. After we get all the major blog posts in there with the links, it will act as a really fun trip into the history of Small Basic! A great idea that would be fun for any product!"
	Nonki	Small Basic: Default Value	MH: "Great overview on the default values of the Smallbasic IDE. Good point for awareness too, since those values impact the way you work with the IDE." RZ: "Very useful info. This is true for any programming language, not just SB." Ed Price: "This lists the default values for all the methods with associated parameters! A great reference that people will want to return to!"
	Nonki	Small Basic: Object	Ed Price: "Objects are key for Small Basic. This article does a great job visually showing some UI-related details. And then I helped sweeten it a bit by linking each object in the Object List to its reference page (also on TechNet Wiki). So it's a nice overview. Great article!" MH: "Good basic explanation of the concept of Objects in Smallbasic and a handy overview of which we have. Hopefully we can add more."

Also worth a mention were the other entries this month:

• Small Basic Community Council: Focus Areas by Ed Price
  RZ: "It's great to kick off the community council"
  Ed Price: "It's great to see the Small Basic Community Council come together and divide up a lot of these opportunities to bring Small Basic out into the community and to help it shine! Thanks to all the council members, including Nonki!"
  
• Features of Microsoft Small Basic v1.0 by Nonki
  MH: "Nice introduction on the features."
  Ed Price: "This is pretty cool. A great overview of Small Basic 1.0! It might be good to list more of the UI buttons in a way similar to how a user navigates them. Great article with good formatting!"
• Small Basic Community Council by Ed Price
  Ed Price: "And then this article gives the basics of what the Small Basic Community Council does and who's on it. The "Focus Areas" article breaks down what each person is doing."

Nonki won all three medals for April! He's been a valuable contributor to the Small Basic community!

   - Ninja Ed