Awareness mechanisms in existing wiki software
April 12, 2009
Most wikis already provide some awareness mechanisms
Awareness mechanisms in existing wiki software
Existing wiki software used in the wild natively offers some awareness mechanisms that offer workspace awareness information. Some mechanisms offer awareness of what other users in the wiki have been doing, who they are, what they are interested in and what kind of expertise they might have. Others give users an overview of the extent of the information contained in the wiki, as well as indicators of what parts of the wiki might need work.
Awareness of users and their activity
There are four awareness mechanisms which are built into almost every wiki implementation that support awareness of the the other users of the wiki and their activity: page history lists, a recent changes page, user profile pages and some ability to watch particular pages and be notified of changes.
A page history list is associated with each page in the wiki, and show each change that has been made to the content of the page all the way back to its initial creation. Users can see when the page was changed, who changed it, and what particular changes to it were done. The page history lists offer feedthrough type awareness information (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002), particularly group-structural awareness and workspace awareness. One can get an idea how the page got to be in its current state, who caused it to be in its current state and when. One can also get an idea of who is invested in the content of the page and who might be experts in the area covered by the page.
The recent changes page is a single page which gives a global overview of the most current activity within the wiki. It shows what pages are being worked on, who is working on them, when the changes occurred, and briefly what kind of change was made: create, edit, delete, rename. There might also be a brief comment about the nature of the change by the author. The recent changes page can offer informal awareness (if activity has happened recently enough), group-structural awareness and workspace awareness. One can get an idea of what parts of the workspace are being worked on, who is doing the work, and when those changes occurred. If one watches the recent changes page enough, one can get and idea of who works on what pages, when they tend to work and possibly what kind of actions they perform (mostly edits? mostly reorganization?).
Users of most wikis have the opportunity to fill out user profile pages: pages about themselves. On those pages they can list biographical information and areas of interest, expertise and responsibility. Profile pages largely offer some social awareness and possibly some group-structural awareness (if we trust the authors to be honest and accurate about their roles within the community).
The ability to watch pages for changes may be implemented by presenting a special page for each user which lists recent changes to pages a user is interested in (MediaWiki) or by having the wiki e-mail the user each time a page they are interested in is changed (MoinMoin). Watch lists give users workspace awareness for certain parts of the wiki.
Some particular wiki implementations have additional awareness mechanisms. MediaWiki uses “talk” pages which house an active discussion and history of discussion of activities and decisions supporting authoring of the associated article. MediaWiki also supports meta-informational markup (called “template messages”) on the content page itself, and this is used in Wikipedia (which is build on MediaWiki) to mark articles as needing particular types of work (“Citation needed”, “Does not meet neutrality standards” ), or as bing in certain states (“Currently being reworked”, “Protected until a dispute can be resolved”), or as being considered for certain actions (“It has been suggested that this article be deleted,” “Should be merged with another article”). Both these mechanisms give awareness of the potential intention of individuals or of the group with regards to future actions, and can enable prediction of what might occur.
MoinMoin Wiki gives per-page access statistics, which give some indication of how much a page is read.
Awareness of existing content
There are two important aspects of team wikis which causes research on workspace awareness in wikis to differ from that which has been done in other groupware. First, wikis are long lasting and constantly evolving. Second, the amount of content in wikis can become large to the extent that even users with long experience with the wiki may not know its full extent. Therefore, most wikis have some support for automatically listing the contents of a wiki in various ways: a list of all page titles, a list of all the words in the page titles, a list of orphans (pages which no other page links to) and of needed pages (links within existing pages which do not go to other pages).
The list of all pages and of words in all pages offer two ways to browse the wiki, and discover content the user may not be aware of, while the list of orphans and needed pages offer users direction as to what they might work on.
