I had known about the MSDN Community Content (aka wiki style setup) for some time. I know, I know...its beta existed for several months (earlier in the year?). So my entry is a bit belated.
But now that I have finally contributed to the MSDN community with a couple entries, I feel that I can blog about it. The fact that it was brought up as a point of conversation recently amongst colleagues sparked me to finally contribute.
They had mentioned how after years of sifting through documentation, they were always left wanting just a bit more. In MSDN's defense, it is great at getting people started and on the right track with good documentation and simple examples. This is a goal that MSDN has met and achieved. However, as with anything, people always want "more" =). They want more sophisticated real world scenarios and detailed descriptions of quirks here and there.
And now with MSDN Community Content, exactly such an opportunity exists. To top it off, it is user generated content coming from people that have been in the trenches and consuming the APIs. It's a bit like taking a slice out of the Wikipedia success and the less well-known fact (according to a colleague) that only a handful of people contribute to specialized topics. While this results in content that is not reflective of the entire general population, it provides a good medium between content that is packaged and fed to you vs. user generated content.
MINOR GLITCHES (ISSUE IN FIREFOX)
My experience with MSDN Community Content edit mode has been decent. There were cross browser issues. For example, in IE, if you attempt to Add content more than once, a popup dialog will appear stating that "You cannot add more than one block at one time". However, if you do the exact same thing in Firefox 2.0, another text editor will appear below your existing one. The footer of the page then starts to act up and flicker.
In true wiki fashion, you can see the history of user generated content by clicking on the 'Show History' text links.
MY POSTS
You can find a couple of my posts here (.NET 1.1 bug with zh-MO CultureInfo.NativeName) and here (tip for use of HybridDictionary in ListDictionary page).
SUSBSCRIBE TO FEED
Lastly, in web 2.0 fashion, you can subscribe to a contributor's feeds.
My feed can be found at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/User-yowhann.aspx
While the search engines on technical content is fairly decent, this is just another drive or effort towards aggregating and consolidating human or in this case, technical knowledge. The internet is slowly coming to realize Tim Berners-Lee's original vision. Although, if you refer to IETF, there are a lot who are not there yet (see wikipedia content on WebDAV).