Problems with awareness support in existing wiki software
April 12, 2009
Existing awareness mechanisms in wikis have limitations, and some kinds of support are entirely lacking.
Problems with awareness support in existing wiki software
The first thing to observe about existing wiki awareness mechanisms is that they do have some effectiveness, and users do use them. They are good in that they are presented via a situated-literal approach, which is “the closest approximation of how awareness information appears in the real world, and is the only one that allows people to use their existing skills with the mechanisms of feedthrough, consequential communication and gestural communication” (Gutwin and Greenberg 2002, p. 30).
There are, however, two kinds of limitations in the awareness support in current wikis: limitations in the existing mechanisms, and lack of support for some kinds of awareness.
Limitations in the existing mechanisms: activity
Some of the existing wiki mechanisms for awareness of activity — page history lists, recent changes pages, and watch lists — are not as useful as they could be because they require the user to work, sometimes work hard, to gather awareness information. A collateral result of this is that users may miss activity in the wiki. In addition, all these mechanisms are ex post facto: one only learns of activity in the workspace after that activity has happened.
Dourish and Bellotti (Dourish and Bellotti 1992) say to present the awareness information within the shared workspace alongside the shared object, so that users can see the information and object concurrently, and find the information most relevant to the object, and also to make information available as and when needed as a context for individual activities. This is not the case with the existing mechanisms.
For the recent history page, the page history for a page and the watch lists the user must purposely navigate away from the pages they may be working on to those pages and then parse the information in order to discover maintain awareness. This they do in addition to the primary work of maintaining and using the wiki. Secondly, by default, the recent changes page typically lists only the last several days or last fifty or one hundred changes, and keeps only the last 90 days. When there are a high volume of changes or when users who do not visit the recent changes page frequently are likely to miss workspace activity.
For the user profiles, users must manually maintain their user profile with accurate information. This suffers from the inherent problems of informational mechanisms due to both the burden on and the dependency on the posting user (Dourish and Bellotti 1992, p. 109). Such information is of limited trustworthiness and utility.
Limitations in the existing mechanisms: existing content
For the mechanisms which support awareness of existing content support in wikis — lists of titles, lists of words in titles — the problem is in the amount and quality of information given. In any but the most simple wikis, the number of pages soon exceeds the capability of users to keep track of, and thus the lists of titles and of words in titles become unusable. Secondly, page titles may not be good indicators of the content the page contains. Wiki pages are typically not structured hierarchically (indeed, a flat namespace is one of the wiki design principles) and as the number of pages grows, the availability of reasonable page titles decreases. At any rate, page titling suffers from some of the same drawbacks of informational awareness mechanisms that Dourish and Bellotti (Dourish and Bellotti 1992) speak of, namely that the user that titled the page may not understand how that title will be interpreted and thus equivocality becomes an issue in discovering existing content from page titles.
Lacks in awareness of activity support in wikis
Existing workspace awareness support mechanisms offer a view of what has changed in the workspace. What is almost always lacking is information about what has been and is being used in the workspace. By this I mean the information which can be used to answer the following kinds of questions:
- What pages do people most often look at?
- What pages do particular users look at?
- What pages are not looked at?
- How do most users traverse the wiki?
This kind of information is important for users of the wiki for several reasons. First, it rewards authorship: if a user contributes to a page and then sees that the page is used, they may be incentivized to contribute to more pages. Conversely, if people who are not contributing see that people actually do use the content in the wiki, they may be more inclined to contribute.
Second, this information may indicate where to dedicate effort. If certain pages in the wiki are used, that may indicate that more or more fully described content of that kind may be appreciated. Conversely, pages which are not used may be revisited to assess whether to improve them, discard them or let them remain.
Third, seeing what pages particular users look at can foster greater knowledge of team members. If I know what you are interested in, I know more about you and can thus know better how I can collaborate with you or assist you in the future.
References
- P. Dourish and V. Bellotti, “Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces,” in CSCW ‘92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, 1992, pp. 107-114.
- C. Gutwin and S. Greenberg, “A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 11, pp. 411-446, 2002.
