7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

WikiSym 2011

Mountain View, California
October 3-5, 2011


Forgot your Password ▸

Register ▸


News & Social Media

WikiSym posts updates to:

If you tweet about WikiSym, please use the hashtag #wikisym.


Sponsors

National Science Foundation


Microsoft

Creative Commons

CosmoCode GmbH

Wiki scaffolding: helping organizations to set up wikis

Authors: Oscar Díaz and Gorka Puente.

Abstract: Organizational wikis are framed by an existing organization. This makes these wikis be especially vigilant upon (1) facilitating the alignment of the wiki with organizational practices, (2) engaging management or (3), promoting employees' participation. To this end, we advocate for the use of “wiki scaffoldings”. A wiki scaffolding is a wiki installation that is provided at the onset, before any contribution is made. It aims to frame wiki contribution along the concerns already known in the hosting organization in terms of glossaries, schedules, organigrams and the like. Thus, wiki contributions do not start from scratch but within a known setting. This paper introduces a language to capture wiki scaffolding in terms of FreeMind's mind maps. These maps can later be mapped into wiki installations in MediaWiki. The paper seeks to validate the approach in a twofold manner. Firstly, by providing literature quotes that suggest the need for scaffolding. Secondly, by providing scaffolding examples for wikis reported in the literature. The findings suggest that wiki scaffolding can be useful to smoothly align wiki activity along the practices of the hosting organization from the onset.

PDF version