Abstract
With collaborative web technologies such as wikis becoming increasingly popular in the workplace, this case study examined how workers at an education research unit within a graduate school of education perceive the wiki as a platform for communication and collaboration, and the extent to which they actually use a workplace wiki for that purpose. Twenty staff members, for whom a wiki was built, were surveyed, while records of their activities on the wiki over a 6-month period were retrieved and analyzed. Findings reveal that though most of these staff members have positive views towards the wiki as a space that can effectively promote information sharing and collaboration, they are not quite as enthusiastic about engaging the wiki as a medium for their daily collaborative work activities. The possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed together with recommendations on the strategies similar organizations can adopt to help encourage and maximize wiki usage in the workplace.
Highlights
A wiki is server-based software that enables users to create and edit content on a web page through a web browser [1]
With regard to staff members' perceptions of the effectiveness of wiki use as a means for promoting collaborative work, the majority of respondents (16 out of 19) strongly agreed or agreed that the use of the wiki can effectively promote information sharing, and fourteen members strongly agreed or agreed on the use of the wiki to enhance work collaboration, while only seven of them agreed that the use of the wiki can promote getting feedback from co-workers
With most research findings highlighting the value of the wiki as a tool from supporting and promoting collaborative knowledge sharing and creation within a learning environment, this study sought to determine, first, if the wiki is perceived as such in a typical work
Summary
A wiki is server-based software that enables users to create and edit content on a web page through a web browser [1]. Wikis embody “Web 2.0” principles as they emphasize user-generated reciprocatory content in a hypertextual system for open information editing and sharing [5]. This is in contrast to the Web 1.0 unidirectional “shopping experience.”. It was purposefully created to be a publicly editable English language encyclopedia Today, it is a free, multi-lingual, open content encyclopedia with more than two million articles in the English Wikipedia alone. It is among the top 10 websites in terms of traffic, and has more than 600 million visitors annually It is criticized for being written by “volunteers,” it is reported as having high quality content [6]. There are various types of wiki sites today, including sites designed for academic environments (e.g., www.squeak.org, in the field of computer science) and those aiming at corporate use (e.g., www.twiki.org and www.clone.org)
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