Wiki as both a creative process and as artifact-in-use
April 12, 2009
Team wikis can be viewed both as a knowledge artifact-in-use and as an ongoing creative group process.
Wiki as both a creative process and as artifact-in-use
The problem of wiki collaboration has to do with some fundamental aspects of wiki nature combined with setting a wiki in an organizational context. Team wikis can be viewed both as a knowledge artifact-in-use and as an ongoing creative group process. Four factors — wiki as artifact-in-use, long life, evolutionary growth, and eventual large size — directly impact what kind of awareness information is needed by the teams that maintain team wikis.
As artifact-in-use, from the time the first page is created in a team wiki, the wiki is in use as a product: team members access and use the knowledge in the wiki. While this is going on, the wiki is changing: pages are added and edited, deleted and moved. Wiki maintenance and growth must be carefully balanced with the utility people get from its use.
Wikis are always in a state of being finished in some sense, and in another sense, always unfinished. They evolve and grow over time, and can live for years, possibly outlasting the people who started them. They can grow to be large, to thousands of pages. These factors make wikis challenging and costly (in terms of effort) to maintain even while they give benefits in terms of knowledge sharing.
In this way, wikis differ from other groupware which have been used in workspace awareness research. Much of the prior work in workspace awareness typically concerns short term collaborations which have the goal of producing product at the end of a few hours or days (for example, Dourish and Bellotti 1992, Greenberg et. al. 1996, Gutwin et. al. 1996). The set of collaborators is constant, they start from a blank slate and produce a finished product, typically a single document.
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.
- S. Greenberg, C. Gutwin, and A. Cockburn, “Awareness through fisheye views in relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware,” in GI ‘96: Proceedings of the conference on Graphics interface ‘96, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1996, pp. 28-38.
- C. Gutwin, M. Roseman, and S. Greenberg, “A usability study of awareness widgets in a shared workspace groupware system,” in CSCW ‘96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, 1996, pp. 258-267.
