From WikiSym 2008

Contents 1 Summary 2 Ideas 2.1 Basic goals of a standard wiki 2.2 Unsorted notes 2.3 Why go for measurement? 2.4 Why not go for measurement? 2.5 Obstacles 2.6 Direct link to this page 2.7 Internal Open space link

Summary

• There is no real and established measurements from a quantitative perspective.
• The best available measure is "changes" on the wiki.
• A very good idea is also to perform a survey with the users.
• Theory created: Examining the amount and direction of links points to the quality of a wiki.
• This is a field of "wiki success measurement" that is pretty unsolved problem yet.

Ideas

• Focus on the measurement of the goals of the wiki.
  • Which type of goals are available for a standard wiki?
    • Every content that was put in wikipedia and was not changed afterwards is valuable.
    • Changes
    • Changed amount of letters
    • time on the wiki
    • amount of logins (total)
    • amount of unique articles
    • evaluation system with peer review
    • Community review
    • amount of pageviews
    • Amount of subscriptions for a page
    • Amount of tags for a page
    • Top editors ranking last month
    • Top editors rankin all time
    • Amount of pages
    • Members in the corporate wiki gardening club
    • Amount of pages that are considered stale (3 month, no activity)
    • Amount of votes on a pages (stars)
    • Amount of links in the wiki in total (more is better)
    • Amount of backlinks to a page
    • Amount of outgoing links per page
    • Comparison to old information systems
    • Onboarding time (do a survey later)
    • Offboarding quality
  • Qualitative Measurement
    • Communications between departments: amount of cross-wiki-web-meetings
    • Amount of different webs (less is better / or even more is better???)
    • Individual evaluation of pages by managers: "What content is really important for the company
    • A free survey with customized questions
      • Do you like the wiki?
      • Do you work with it? How often?
      • How much time does it safe?
    • Survey might be specially targeted to new employees, who really need easy information more than other people
      • and that also gives information on how easy to learn the UI is

• Calculating the ROI of a wiki is mostly a way of operationalizing the construct of 'wiki quality' into a type of measurement.
• Which quantitative measurements do work? Which are available?
  • Number of changes in total or per user per period
  • Number of new or erased letters through the change
  • Evaluation of the quality of a document

Basic goals of a standard wiki

• Increasing turnover
  • Single point of information

• Saving costs
  • Efficiency
    • Quick changes to websites
    • Reduces the time to find information in the intranet
  • Effectivity
    • Not that much staled content

• Knowledge

Unsorted notes

• Changes are a fairly good measurement.
• There is little alternative to wikis. Maybe excel is an alternative. Not a good one though.

Why go for measurement?

• There is loads of space to improve productivity, efficiency.
• It fits in reporting schemes of companies.
• With a good measurement for wikis their usage will increase.

Why not go for measurement?

• It should be obvious for the manager.
• Every quantitative system is easy to be tricked. And easy to be outdated.

Obstacles

• There is no measurement available for the status quo at all.
• If there is a measurement it often has deficiencies.

Direct link to this page

• http://tinyurl.com/wiki-measurement

Internal Open space link

• http://wikisym.org/ws2008/index.php/Tools_to_study_wikis