Another way to improve quality: clean out the closet!
In that last months, we often complained about the quality in SAP Community.
As far as I can tell, the idea to reach that, was to get more quality contend published.
I agree that having more good content can improve overall content quality.But there’s another aspect:
Removing bad content will also help.
We do that already, reporting bad blogs (or not even letting them through moderation), down voting low-quality questions, trying to educate new users and so on.
But what we (at least I) haven’t done so far, is take a look at what content we created in the past!
For my Blogs, I try to do that now!
I sure wrote some good blogs (feedback does tell), but there might be some, that are not that great:
Maybe I started of learning about something (and blogging about it on the way) but then had other priorities – #eCatt.
Or I posted something very relevant at past time, but now it’s no longer true (things do change) #saponesupportlaunchpad.
It’s probably quite hard to delete something you created, after all, you put some effort into it. But with every lifecycle-management, decommissioning (=the end of life) should also be part of it, right?
So this is an inventory if my “not-so-high-quality-blogs”:
All of my “SAP ONE Support Launchpad“-Blogs?! (Not linking all of them…) Those where exciting, when it was new, now the problems are either solved or probably will never be.
But at least with this there’s lots of other people’s content in those 51 Comments, I wouldn’t want to kill that!
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/04/07/sap-one-support-launchpad-my-whish-list/
This one I don’t think is that bad:
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/02/22/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-a-classroom-training/
…but it didn’t receive ANY feedback, that’s why it might be irrelevant!
This helped me to structure my thoughts back then, but I guess there are dozens like this, so this might be a candidate for removal.
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/06/14/how-to-learn-to-love-adt/
There are does “there’s the new SAP Community“-Blogs:
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/10/first-steps-new-commnity…./ https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/10/first-steps-sap-community/
…good for nostalgia, not sure if there’s more to it.
Just have to keep this link from the comments: 🙂
recent, un-answerd questions on S/4HANA
https://answers.sap.com/tags/73554900100800000266?sort=newest&filter=unanswered
(I did open my old blog to get that link already a few times this year! It’s a few clicks, but still the fastest way for me. (Except if I would use browser bookmarks, I know….)).
Ideaplace is long gone, so this blog could well go:
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/10/13/bring-ideas-ideaplace-promote/
Those two are a classical “I tried to learn/do something, but then didn’t:
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/11/29/creating-test-data-with-ecatt/
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/11/29/creating-test-data-with-ecatt-part-2-recording/
Noticed something and felt like writing it down:
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/12/06/appending-tables-in-s4hana-marc-append-adt/
With this one, even when writing I noticed already, that it’s basically only a link-collection. But there’s valuable content in the comments so it’s a keeper!
https://blogs.sap.com/2017/01/11/whats-to-know-about-abap-package-concepts-se21-today/
Well, that’s a link collection:
(once all those are tagged with [an AdT-Tag] this sure can go! )
https://blogs.sap.com/2017/04/11/blogs-about-adt-abap-in-eclipse-hard-to-find-as-theres-no-tag/
Now that I got this inventory, what can I do with it? I’m not going to delete anything today, but I think those are candidates for removal of some kind, thus increasing the overall quality of my blogs.
I think back in SCN we had “personal blogs” which were not part of the spaces but only associated with your user, but we don’t have that here.
Also it would be helpful to see, if someone links to your blog (like in SCN, where we had “incoming links”) – I wouldn’t want to break those links!
(I do notice the irony of me putting links to the deletion-candidates above . But I have control over this blog, so I can remove them again if I want to).
Over to you:
Have you ever thought about cleaning out your blog closet? What solution did you come up with?
Do you think it’s even a valid thought I have here? Or – in the age of big data – should we treat SAP Community as an insert-only (never-delete) database ?
best
Joachim
Interesting topic.
I think I would delete my old posts only if by accident I provided incorrect information. But in that case maybe it's better to update it?
From time to time I find valuable information even in blogs from 2010. Even if there are three blogs about same topic, but written by different person I think it's good to keep them all. Every post is written from different perspective and sometimes even a single screenshot can help.
It's different story if you want to do some rearangment - for example group some blogs into series. But this is also dangerous, because some people might have the URL in their bookmarks.
And I'm not worried about the amount of content on SCN (or Facebook). As long as they allow me to publish posts I assume they are happy about it and can handle the storage. There are many things that worries me way more than that 🙂
Joachim Rees Great post and I think its goal will remain relevant forever:).
Allow me to ping Jamie Cantrell for the blogging aspect. I'm also looking into automated ways for improving the content quality/navigation experience in the Q&A platform.
However in my opinion a proactive approach by contributors would be really helpful.
Ahhhhhhhhhhh... But are we really complaining about old blogs? I don't think so. Old blogs may still have value to people that are on a certain version. No comments on your blog doesn't mean that many people have read it.
I think I agree - removing wrong information would drive me to remove my blogs. My frustration with the content is marketing, notes, new release information. Do I report it? No, because someone might find it useful. I just get frustrated with it. But I don't read it - so no big deal.
Michelle
Hmm..I'm not frustrated about posts with notes and new releases. Very often I find there valuable information that I missed or I would not look at.
Marketing is a different story and I report them (but not always).
I strongly agree that the old blogs should not be removed 🙂
See - you're the someone that likes it. I'm sure there are many more people that like it. 🙂 Personal preference, that's for sure.
It takes me a second to skip the blog. If you like it - who am I to say it shouldn't be here!
Yes - I went back and commented on some of these links. I should look at my own blogs - that aren't really mine because this is my fifth id. (Make sure they aren't spreading misinformation. I really didn't like objects for a long time.)
It's a noble intention, Joachim, but I posit to you that the blogs are, if you will, the historical documents. Therefore going back and pruning them sounds like something out of 1984. 🙂
For example, even though now the Support Launchpad may look completely different, it does not change what happened before. What you wrote earlier, was valid at that time. And now we can even look back at your blogs and admire what long way we've come since then.
If something has a purpose of always containing the correct information then I think it really shouldn't be posted as a blog but rather as a document (that we used to have on SCN) or wiki. And some completely fleeting information, such as "hey, there is a new release" should have their own announcement functionality.
If you feel something is just completely irrelevant, outdated, and you wouldn't want anyone to find and rid it then by all means, get rid of it. How lucky for you to have retained the same user ID to be able to do that! 😉
Er. Yeah. What Michelle said and Jelena posited.
As policy, we don't delete old blog posts. Per their points, we can't really say whether someone still finds value in the content. Also, we have badges/missions tied to blogs, and deleting them could cause a bit of a mess (based on my limited understanding of gamification and missions).
We can't stop people from deleting their old blogs, but it's not something we encourage. You might be surprised that your old blogs could still be useful. As an example, you mentioned your Idea Place post. While some of that stuff is indeed outdated, a few of your links now redirect to Customer Influence...and people can suggest new features there -- as you might already know. 🙂
--Jerry
Thanks you all for your kind feedback and input!
So I get the in the very most cases, deleting your own, older blogs is not a good idea.
So I slightly change my suggestion: it is a good Idea to go over your old blogs from time to time, but more with a focus of maybe updating something if you have new knowledge or things change since back then.
I try to always mark my updates, e.g.
mainly to make it easy to spot which part has changed, but this also does cater towards the documentation aspect Jelena Perfiljeva mentions.
best
Joachim
Hi Joachim,
I fully agree with your statement "So I slightly change my suggestion: it is a good Idea to go over your old blogs from time to time, but more with a focus of maybe updating something if you have new knowledge or things change since back then."
After a change a couple year ago, the main issue became low traffic here so definitely I would focus with my limiter time to think about new content going over past entries to get a bit reflection, maybe even laughing a bit but correcting only in case something is (and was at the time being) untrue.
Best regards,
Waldemar