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Thinking About Wikis

by Admin

Society for New Communications Research Update

By Elizabeth Albrycht

Many of us who are early adopters of this technology believe that the wiki is an intriguing collaborative tool that has the potential for vastly improving knowledge worker productivity. This goal, improving knowledge worker productivity, is one of the major organizational challenges of the 21st century, as recently discussed in the Economist survey of “The New Organization��? in its January 21, 2006 issue. While there are a plethora of collaborative tools and technologies available today, what makes the wiki so interesting, and such a good candidate for research studies, is that it is the most radically open of all tools, enabling anyone to change anyone else's content in mere seconds. Therefore, it very quickly gets at the heart of the human, social challenges to managing and creating knowledge.

We at the Society for New Communications Research are about to embark on a study of wiki use. Our goal in our project is to study how knowledge workers in creative roles (advertising, marketing, public relations, design, etc.) are actually using wikis in the context of their everyday work. This should enable us to make some judgments about what features are helpful and what features are not. At that point, we can start making recommendations about best practices for wiki design.

In preparation for this study, we conducted a review of recent research and scholarly papers that have been produced on the topic of wikis.

As we evaluate the potential of wikis in organizations, several broad topic areas have presented themselves to us as critical to the success of a wiki. We won't have our results on our study for a few months, but in the meantime, we thought it would be useful to share with you these broad topic areas and some of the thinking and research that has been done to address them.

At the outset of our reading, it became very clear that any analysis of wiki usage will be multidisciplinary in focus. This, of course, did not surprise us, as all of these new participatory communications tools have the same attributes. In order to understand, design and successfully roll out a wiki, a familiarity with current knowledge and practices in areas as diverse as small group cooperation, knowledge management, individual psychology, societal norms and behaviors, and management skills and technical design. Below, we have identified some interesting sources of information that link each discipline with participatory communications. We share some of this thinking with you below. But first, we'll start off with a summary of some of the key challenges of collaborative systems that must be kept in mind when embarking on a wiki adventure.

Challenges of Collaborative Systems

When reading through the literature of collaboration, a few key research questions arose again and again. These include:

-How do you encourage individuals to contribute their knowledge when it is a primary factor in the way they are evaluated and rewarded? The latter leads to knowledge hoarding to increase value vs. knowledge sharing, which is what collaborative systems are designed, at heart, to do.

-How do you deal with group dynamics in order to keep participants productive?

-How can the collaborative technology be designed to be a part of an employee's work process vs. an add-on system?

-How can you best support the learning curve demanded by the technology?

Knowledge management experts have been pondering these topics for years, by observing the use of, mostly, monolithic, top-down KM systems As the technology expands into bottom-up, emergent systems, like wikis, many of their insights should be applied, in order to avoid repeating mistakes. As regards the encouragement of individual contributions, for example,

"Individuals might see the centralization and sharing of knowledge as the surrender of wisdom they may see as their exclusive value to an organization. Thus experts highlight the need to create a reward system focusing not on individualistic, self-promotion but rather on the disbursement of knowledge." (Gonzalez-Reinhart)

We must acknowledge up front that wikis will not work for everyone. An organization with a strong, command-control, hierarchical power structure will probably not be successful: a junior employee probably would not dare to correct a mistake a senior employee makes in the wiki. Additionally, the form of the wiki itself may work better for some kinds of work than others. For example, they may have particular challenges for creative work vs. structured work:

"...a wiki may work well for structured information that needs corrections and minor edits, and will need a core group of very active people to make strides in innovative content or categorization. It may work less well for development of new content or new structures, unless the group doing it already is tightly knit professionally (and, perhaps, also socially)." (Andersen)
The makeup of the team itself is also important. Are they geographically dispersed or sitting in the same building? Are they all from the same discipline or are they cross-disciplinary? Do they usually work together or are they an ephemeral team that is coming together for a project? All of these things will have an impact on the success of the wiki, and they need to be taken into consideration when designing the wiki and its rules/regulations of use.

Using a wiki means you have to learn the syntax of adding and editing content. While this is not difficult, there is a learning curve. But learning the syntax is arguably the easiest task. As those of us can attest, the first time you sit down in front of a screen that says, “Add your text here,��? is a daunting experience, not simply because your thoughts immediately become published and available for use (and editing by others), but because you also have to think about how you want to arrange the information. What page links where? Do you need a page of links? The information navigation issues have to addressed at the time of writing content, which is an entirely new skill for people. The good news is that everything can be changed later, but one should not discount the time it will take become comfortable and fluent with this type of environment.

Of course, a wiki doesn't have to be a completely open environment. Templates can be used, with design and navigation decided upon in advance. But these decisions will have ramifications for how the system is used, and there are many variables. For example, does the interface model match the user's mental model? Does the tool allow for customization through its simplicity (fewer features, flexible UI) or through its configurability (many features, tailored to specific use, i.e., the interface tends to be more rigidly defined). There are lessons to be learned here from traditional KM systems, which, having been around for years, are currently more robust and stable than wikis.

Because wikis are a new technology, there haven’t been many research studies conducted about them. Most of what exists relates to Wikipedia, a public wiki. Many of the findings for Wikipedia will not apply for a private, team wikis. But, we think there are lessons that can be learned from Wikipedia, and they have been incorporated into our factors below. Our next step is to survey people about their wiki use and observe that use in context. Our goal is to document actual practices and increase our understanding of these success factors, helping people to better design and implement wikis for their particular environments. In the meantime, we hope you find the information here helpful.

Factors Important for Wiki Success

We have identified several factors to consider when designing and implementing a wiki. None of these alone are sufficient to wiki success, but we believe each is indeed, important, perhaps even necessary. Our objective is to provide qualitative data that will support these assumptions, as well as uncover new criteria.

-Support of Reputation Development

-Clear Procedures of Management and Discipline

-Defined and Followed User Responsibilities

-Content: Knowledge Creation and Decision Making

-Group Attributes

-Effective Wiki Design

-Training/Convincing People

Support of Reputation Development

Gonzalez-Reinhart wrote in her article, “Wiki and the Wiki Way: Beyond a Knowledge Management Solution:"

"There are two essential catalysts for knowledge sharing: mutual trust and mutual influence...A precondition of trust and influence is communication...Additionally, through communication, individuals are able to influence, or be influenced by others, and influence conveys mutual understanding, which entails shared knowledge...As a result of this dialogue aspect to sharing knowledge, 'conversational' knowledge creation and expansion is seen as a means for developing wisdom" (Gonzalez-Reinhart)

There is a rich body of work in the area of scientific reputation development that demonstrates again and again how the reputation is a key motivator for sharing knowledge. From Robert Merton's groundbreaking work in the 1940s to more recent studies of the open software development community, reputation emerges again and again as a key motivator. What is so interesting about wikis is that reputation development is built into the product. Every person's contribution is logged, and by contributing and working on the system, a person quickly develops a stake in its success. However, there are other things that can be added to a wiki to make reputation development even more recognizable, such as personal pages for each author or the ability to share personal goals and recognize their achievement.

When you are getting ready to implement a wiki, you should ask yourself up front, “How will this wiki support people in their quest to develop a good reputation?"

Clear Procedures of Management and Discipline

While there has been a tendency to think of wikis as an egalitarian (even Utopian) tool where everyone cooperates out of the goodness of their hearts and developing reputation, no wiki will work without management and discipline. Human beings, with their multiple personalities and motivations make it crucial to address these issues from the beginning. This doesn't mean it has to be done in a command-control fashion, but as virtual communities have learned again and again, without some form of disciplining behavior, the group will likely fall victim to the actions of a few misbehaviors and break apart. Therefore, some group time needs to be spent developing guidelines and procedures about how decisions will be taken, and how problems will be resolved. This means creating a group constitution.

"The important point is that these rules emerge from within the medium by using it. Furthermore, they are always subject to discussion and can be altered if they are found to be unnecessary. This discussion has to be lead within the community and should be open to all participating members in order to reflect all the concerns there are within a group." (Ebersbach et al. 1-9)

The strength of the wiki model is that each person who uses the wiki can also manage it and police it. Now, it is unlikely that each person would indeed take on that responsibility. In fact, studies show that usually a core group emerges that does so. This is not without its dangers, however:

"In a small wiki supporting a cooperative group, a hierarchy may develop and one or two users may become the invisible autocrats of the wiki. With skill, these dedicated users may enhance usability of the overall wiki for the entire group, but they are also at risk of overpowering the rest of the team, or worse, making the wiki useful only for themselves." (Wei et al.)

You certainly don't want to outlaw controversy, which can be a strong force for creativity: “"Controversy, as it turns out, generates the highest quality outcomes possible." (Productive Controversy) But rather, you need ways of incentivizing good behavior and addressing negative behaviors.

Defined and Followed User Responsibilities

A wiki is all about peer review. For example, users have the responsibility for fixing mistakes they find, when they find them. This needs to be instilled via ongoing conversation and example by managers. But the very fact of giving people this responsibility adds to the possibility of success:

"With so many possibilities given to the participants they have the freedom - and the responsibility - to contribute in those ways they think are best suited for them. Taking people seriously and giving them responsibility brings out the full potential in them." (Ebersbach et al. 1-9)

Users are motivated in behavior both via management surveillance and self-surveillance. The group norms and procedures describe in the section above handles the former. The latter will both descend from the former, but also reflect a person's own personalities and experiences. This can represent a challenge to managers if a person is too self-conscious to share their ideas. This means, that at least initially, a wiki will need to be used in conjunction with other tools, such as email. You might want to consider adding private pages for idea development, as suggested by this study:

"A wiki hypertext is typically accessible and editable by all. While this removes impediments to collaboration, it often deters participants who would rather incubate ideas before bringing them to the group. This is especially the case where creative ideas are at stake." (Burrow)

Content: Knowledge Creation and Decision Making

An important question when it comes to the content of the wiki is: Are people collaborating on knowledge acquisition or creative knowledge/idea development? Initial observations suggest that wikis might be better for the former vs. the latter. (Burrow) Overall, however, there seem to be some distinctive benefits of wikis as a cooperative system for knowledge development. For example,

"...research literature which suggests that groups utilizing a knowledge based system make superior decisions." (Gonzalez-Reinhart)

"Wiki pages mirror physical communities of socialization and information communication, thereby granting tremendous power in an online environment to conversational knowledge creation." (Gonzalez-Reinhart)

"The content produced collectively is more likely to meet the concerns and issues of the community since it has its sources in a social interaction." (Ebersbach et al. 1-9)

In order to get at the heart of what is going on here, one must better understand knowledge and how it is developed and shared in various types of groups. An excellent article by (Griffith et al. 265-287) summarizes much of the work done on this topic and provides explanations of the difference between individual and social knowledge, definitions of tacit, implicit and explicit knowledge, then analyzes how knowledge management tools can help or hinder the development of collective knowledge. They write,

"Does information technology in virtual teams increase the transformation of tacit knowledge to explicit, while at the same time reducing the development of new, individually held tacit knowledge? Do such dynamics increase value to the organization while decreasing value to the individual? We think the answers maybe yes, unless certain safeguards are put in place." (Griffith et al. 265-287)

These safeguards are discussed in the article, and should be considered by anyone getting ready to implement a wikis. These include:

- “proactive effort...to verbalize rules, terminology, and descriptions��?

- “use highly enriched forms of media"

- “Access to and appropriation of tools and structures that support highly interdependent work “

Group Attributes

Any collaborative work tool is by default used by a group. Therefore group effects always come into play and always need to be considered up front. We discussed some of the negative effects above in the management and discipline section. There are a variety of positive effects as well, however, that should be mentioned, as regards group use of wikis. First of all, thought the very design of the wiki, community development is reinforced:

"Wikis also contribute to participants consciously and actively benefiting from both the knowledge of others and the creation of group consciousness that are crucial in the community building process." (Fuchs-Kittowski et al)

This group consciousness is important to the success of group projects, as it enables individuals to give up some autonomy, receiving the benefits of group participation in its place: the opportunities to learn from others, to gain new insights, to receive emotional support, etc.
A wiki can bring together a group separated in space and time for productive knowledge development. While we have already noted some of the challenges of this, the benefits to an organization that supports such group development can be significant, not the least of which is access to potentially innovative ideas from group members usually on the periphery of the organization. This benefit is discussed in detail in the book, The Only Sustainable Edge, by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown.

Effective Wiki Design

While the wiki is indeed technology with an impressive openness of options for content navigation, it is not entirely without form. Nor do organizations have to opt for dramatic openness; they can, for instance, set up templates. But we should remember that the design of a wiki itself helps determine the knowledge that is created using it, and even structures the groups using it.

"The open principle solicits the constant interaction of wiki contributors through editing page syntax or content, and adding or correcting posted knowledge - elements that foster the social ties vital for knowledge sharing...The importance of constant communication is present within wiki pages since, in essence, the only form of interaction among contributing individuals in through explicitly written words...Communication in this context further enhances mutual trust and influence - elements innate in wiki resulting from its design rules and structure." (Gonzalez-Reinhart)

As mentioned above, our goal in our project is to study how people are using wikis in the context of their everyday work.

Training/Convincing People

A wiki should not be set in front of a team as a fait accompli. Rather, managers will need to work with team members to convince them of the value of the tool, and roll it out gradually. By moving a segment of work to the wiki, so that people have to use it during their daily work processes, people will begin to get a sense of how it works and its benefits. During this adoption process, certain behaviors will emerge and various people will begin to take on roles. The manager must keep close watch on this, and reward those behaviors that work, and discipline those that do not.

"Think carefully about incentive systems, and try to make them normative (praise, citations, peer respect, influence) rather than instrumental (pay, promotion, other forms of tangible rewards) as much as possible." (Andersen)

The entire team should work together to create the guidelines for use of the wiki, as mentioned above in the management and discipline section.

The manager's own attitude will play an important part in the overall acceptance of the wiki.

"Too much involvement by a manager can lead to posturing from the other participants, who will contribute to get brownie points rather than to get value out of the wiki. Too little involvement will quickly send the message that the wiki is not important and hence not worth spending time on." (Andersen)

As with many technologies, social issues will likely take up more time than technical issues during the adoption period, as many attributes of a wiki are quite new to most people's experience. While knowledge workers in the creative industries may indeed have experience with group editing of documents and other collaborative tools, the radical openness of a wiki, which asks users to simultaneously create content and provide navigation while enabling the ability to easily edit any page will require some new skills and attitudes. With time, we believe wikis can become an invaluable tool for producing and managing knowledge development. We will look for the evidence of this during our study.

Conclusion

As a relatively new collaboration tool, wikis present both intriguing possibilities and real challenges towards the goal of improving knowledge worker productivity. Much research still needs to be done on how people are actually using the technology in their day-to-day work so best practices for design and implementation can be developed. Some general areas to pay close attention to are emerging as success factors, as described in this article. As more early adopters roll out the technology and share their results, we believe that the lessons learned will support our contention that wikis have a bright future in the organization.

Works Cited

Andersen, Espen. "Using Wikis in a Corporate Context." 10 Nov 2004. 23 1 2006 http://www.espen.com/papers/EA-CorpWiki-v1.00.pdf.

Burrow, Andrew Lincoln. "Negotiating Access Within Wiki: A System to Construct and Maintain a Taxonomy of Access Rules." HYPERTEXT '04:Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia 2004: 77-86. 23 1 2006 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1012807.1012831

Ebersbach, Anja, and Markus Glaser. "Towards Emancipatory Use of a Medium: The Wiki." International Journal of Information Ethics 2 (2004): 1-9. 13 1 2006 http://www.uhisrc.com/FTB/Wiki/wiki_way_brief%5B1%5D-Jennifer%2005.pdf
, Frank, and Andre Kohler. "Wiki Communities in the Context of Work Processes." Proceedings WikiSym '05 Oct 2005. 23 1 2006 . http://www.uhisrc.com/FTB/Wiki/wiki_way_brief%5B1%5D-Jennifer%2005.pdf

Gonzalez-Reinhart, Jennifer. "Wiki and the Wiki Way: Beyond a Knowledge Management Solution." Information Systems Research Center Feb 2006. 13 1 2006 http://www.uhisrc.com/FTB/Wiki/wiki_way_brief%5B1%5D-Jennifer%2005.pdf.

Griffith, Terri L., John E. Sawyer, and Margaret A. Neale. "Virtualness and Knowledge in Teams: Managing the Love Triangle of Organizations, Individuals, and Information Technology." MIS Quarterly 27.2 (2003): 265-287.
"ProductiveControversy." Meatball Wiki. 23 1 2006 http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?ProductiveControversy.

Wei, Carolyn , Brandon Maust, Jennifer Barrick, Elisabeth Cuddihy, and Jan H. Spyridakis. "Wikis for Supporting Distributed Collaborative Writing." Proceedings of the Society for Technical Communication 52nd Annual Conference May 2005. 13 1 2006 http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/research/pubs/jspyridakis/STC_Wiki_2005_STC_Attribution.pdf.

Elizabeth Albrycht is the research chair of the Society for New Communications Research. She co-founded and built the program for the 2005 and 2006 New Communications Forum, a conference series designed to bring journalists and marketing and PR professionals together to learn how to use participatory communications tools. She is a 16-year veteran of high technology public relations practice andhas authored articles on blogging, RSS and other new tools for PRSA's Tactics magazine, the IABC's CW Bulletin, and the Future of Work eNewsletter, and has presented teleseminars and in-person seminars on new communications tools for PRSA. She is a member of the Future of Work, PRSA and the IAOC. She blogs at CorporatePR and is the editor of Future Tense, a Corante blog that explores the future of work.

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