visible artifacts

By: Chris Malek

Apr 08 2009

Category: Articles

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I propose three design guidelines to follow when considering changing or augmenting wiki technology:

1. Try not to decrease the sense and power of community that successful wikis depend on.  Try rather to increase it.
2. Likewise, try not to decrease the effectiveness of the accountability measures inherent in wiki technology.
3. Try not to increase the cost of making changes to the wiki.

I feel that it is those design principles of simplicity and naturalness which have directly caused the recent success and proliferation of wikis.   In my opinion, much of the prior work in augmenting or changing wiki technology to support different goals  conflicts with one or more of these guidelines, most often it is by increasing the cost of wiki maintenance.   This is especially true of the work among academics to add semantic web support to wikis, which  in every case I’ve seen makes making edits much more laborious and difficult.

One of my primary goals in this work on adding awareness support to team wikis is not ignore these guidelines and thus possibly fundamentally change the way that wikis are used and perceived.

Wiki design principles

To arrive at those guidelines, I went back to what Ward Cunningham said were the design principles that drove his creation of wiki technology in the first place.   Here they are in their entirety (all design goals copied directly from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples):

• Open. Should a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see ?t.
• Organic/co-evolution. The structure of the site is expected to grow and evolve with the community that uses it.
• Incremental. It must be both possible and useful to cite unwritten pages.
• Observable. Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any other visitor.
• Convergent. Ambiguity and duplication can be removed by finding and citing similar or related content.
• Mundane/undistracted. A small number of conventions provide all necessary formatting.
• Universal. The mechanisms of editing and organizing are the same as those of writing so that any writer is automatically and editor and organizer.
• Tolerant. All input will produce output even when the output is not likely to be that desired.
• Overt/concrete. The formatted and printed output will suggest the input required to reproduce it.
• Unified vocabulary. Page names will be drawn from a ?at space so that no additional context is required to interpret them.
• Precise. Pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes, typically by forming noun phrases.

I summarize these as follows:

If we make pages visible to all in the community, show how they have evolved over time and also who changed them and when, then give people in the community the freedom to edit any page while making editing and organizing the wiki as low cost to the greatest number of people as we can, the content in the wiki will increase in scope and quantity over time.

I distill that even further into three themes:

• Community: the wiki is a community resource, and social ties within the community bind people to the common purpose of making the wiki better.
• Accountability: changes are done in public, in front of the community, and attributable to individual authors.  Knowing this should lead authors to try harder to do good work, and hopefully reduce incidence of intentionally poor or counterproductive work.
• Low cost: changing the wiki does not cost people much in terms of overhead.  If the activities associated with maintaining the wiki (changing a page or reorganizing it or reverting a page to fix vandalism) do not cost an author much, they will be more likely to actually do the work.  Or there will be, at least, less disincentive to do the work.