Careful observers may have noticed a few little icons at the top of Books Online pages recently:
The little round contributors icons take you to their Github profiles, like Rick Byham’s.
The all link – well, that doesn’t actually work, because it goes here:
Which isn’t visible to the public.
Yet.
But note that not only is .NET open source, but even Azure’s documentation is open source. That’s right – you can make a pull request and update Azure’s equivalent of Books Online.
So it’s entirely conceivable – nay, I say probable – that SQL Server’s Books Online will end up accepting pull requests from mere mortals like you and me. It won’t save Microsoft money by any means – imagine the junk “contributions” they’re going to get – but in the age of running SQL Server on Linux, they’re going to need all the help they can get. The Linux community already understands how open source works, and they’re going to expect to be able to give back to the documentation efforts as folks learn what it takes to run SQL Server successfully on Linux.
It’s a brave new world. I love it.
2 Comments. Leave new
This would be an awesome development that could really make documentation useful at last. They should apply it to MSDN as well. Much of that is totally useless or will omit key information required to make the articles actually useful, and there is also critical stuff that is very confusingly written or just plain wrong. Raymond Chen will frequently call it out sections on his blog and rewrite them so that they are actually useful.
For whatever reason, I almost never scroll down to the comments section on existing BOL pages, but sometimes it contains good info! Curated, inline content from users could be really great.