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Wikis have emerged as an important Web 2.0 technology for facilitating collaboration in organizations. Although researchers have begun to analyze their use in organizations and develop metrics to study their usage, there has been limited statistical analysis of use data. In addition, much of the empirical analysis of wikis is based on Wikipedia. This paper mitigates those limitations in the literature by examining data generated from a large consulting organization, Accenture, to statistically analyze the relationships between different use variables.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to evaluating contributions in collaborative authoring environments, and in particular, Wikis using social network measures.

A social network model for Wikipedia has been constructed, and metrics of importance such as centrality have been defined. Data has been gathered from articles belonging to the same topic using a web crawler, in order to evaluate the outcome of the social network measures in the articles.

Finds that the question of the reliability regarding Wikipedia content is a challenging one and as Wikipedia grows, the problem becomes more demanding, especially for topics with controversial views such as politics or history.

It is believed that the approach presented here could be used to improve the authoritativeness of content found in Wikipedia and similar sources.

This work tries to develop a network approach to the evaluation of Wiki contributions, and approaches the problem of quality Wikipedia content from a social network point of view.

The purpose of this paper is to further the debate on Knowledge Artefacts (KAs), by presenting the design of WikiRate, a Collective Awareness platform whose goal is to support a wider public contributing to the generation of knowledge on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of companies.

The material presented in the paper comes from the first-hand experience of the authors as part of the WikiRate design team. This material is reflexively discussed using concepts from the field of science and technology studies.

Using the concept of the “funnel of interest”, the authors discuss how the design of a KA like WikiRate relies on the designers’ capacity to translate general statements into particular design solutions. The authors also show how this funnelling helps understanding the interplay between situativity and objectivity in a KA. The authors show how WikiRate is a peer-production platform based on situativity, which requires a robust level of objectivity for producing reliable knowledge about the ESG performance of companies.

This paper furthers the debate on KAs. It presents a relevant design example and offers in the discussion a set of design and community building recommendations to practitioners.

In a project-based learning experience, the detailed monitoring of the activities in which team members participate can be useful to evaluate their work. However, the project activity produces a large amount of data that can be hardly assessed by a single project supervisor. This poses a scalability issue if the number of users or projects size increases. In this vein, the purpose of this paper is to make the assessment of online learning experiences more sustainable.

This paper describes a learning-oriented collaborative assessment method, supported by an open data framework. Also, an architecture for the extraction of different indicators to facilitate the assessment process is presented.

The assessment method and the open data framework were applied to a project-based course on web engineering. This experience has provided positive evidences because the grade measurement was backed up with assessment evidences and calculated with less effort.

At the moment, results indicate that apparently there are no significant evidences against the sustainable evaluation practices for students’ summative evaluation. Nevertheless, when more data become available, a more statistically significant analysis could be made to determine the influence of the assessment practices in the final result of the evaluated skills.

In contrast to various existing proposals for e-assessment, the strategy focuses on assessing learning experiences in software development projects. Also, the approach is based on the reuse of information from external process supporting tools by integrating a number of metrics in a non-intrusive way.

This literature review explores the academic material comprising applications, cases, courses, and classroom-based research in higher education where wiki tools appeared as an instructional technology. The authors define and describe the wiki concept, outlining a framework for wikis deployed as instructional technology tools. Additionally, analyses and syntheses of the findings are described from an interdisciplinary research literature search across many fields, along with a number of illustrative, exemplary cases demonstrating the application of this tool to teaching and learning. The authors also identify research evidence that outlines the benefits and strengths offered by new wiki technologies, while highlighting challenges, weaknesses, and issues encompassing their application in courses. The authors also outline numerous theories of learning that can be associated with wiki work; new forms of wiki-based learning; patterns of wiki technology use; characteristics of learners using wikis; and the changing role of teaching and teachers who instruct with wikis. Finally, we conclude with a summary of the findings and suggested future directions for studying wikis in higher education (HE). Although no broad, definitive prognosis yet exists that can point to a cause–effect relationship between the application of wikis and increases in learning, a significant body of evidence has emerged that suggests that wikis positively stimulate the learning environment and increase the collaborative capabilities of learners when applied to course work.

This chapter provides an interpretive account of how a large student cohort deals with a major inquiry-based learning (IBL) assessment task in a first-year Marketing Principles subject in undergraduate business studies. It offers a practical example of IBL in action in a discipline that has hitherto received little attention in the IBL literature, namely business, specifically marketing. The chapter positions IBL within the various contemporary pedagogies. The context of Hutchings and O’Rourke’s (2006) study of IBL in action is extended for first-year cohorts, technology-enhanced teaching and the marketing discipline. Further, Hutchings and O’Rourke’s four-part method for describing IBL in action is followed: (1) the enabling factors for the students’ work are described; (2) the process for which they decided on the task is discussed; (3) the method of work is considered, namely ongoing collaboration in a wiki and (4) the outcomes produced are discussed. The chapter reflects on the effects of the IBL task on student learning from both students’ and instructors’ points of view. Material from the students’ work and feedback after completion of the IBL task is used to illustrate the process and inform the interpretive account. The main lessons to be learnt for educators are summarised.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new knowledge quality assessment framework based on interdependencies between content and schema as knowledge resources to enhance the quality of the knowledge that is being generated, disseminated and stored in a collaborative environment.

A knowledge elaboration approach is based on intervening factors of schematic clustering applied to a trial wiki bulletin board. Through this schematic intervention in the form of group creation within a wiki environment, a user-centric mechanism is created to substantiate, compose and narrate the generated contents in a self-organizing way.

Through this approach, quality in content can be enhanced by means of a favourably manipulated collaboration schema adopted by the knowledge management system (KMS) users instead of applying knowledge mining tools.

With consideration to trust as a significant factor in this study, the verification and referral process may vary for KMS structures that are of larger scale or in low-trust collaborative environments.

This study demonstrates transition to higher quality knowledge with less time spent on the original content refinement and composition by paying due consideration to the interdependencies between knowledge resource content and its schema. Validation is done via a clustered group structure in a specially designed wiki which had been used as a discussion bulletin board on directed topics over an extended period.

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative in-house knowledge management system of core know-how for European Commission (EC) officials. It shows how the quality of the work of officials could be improved and how talent growth and recognition could be better fostered within the EC, taken as target for the proposal, as well as example for other large, multi-disciplinary organisations that might wish to implement a similar system.

The study considered what the key issues for better knowledge management in the EC are, and what could be learnt from the successful implementation of Diplopedia, the knowledge wiki of the US Department of State, and from previous studies of author rank, quality and stability of individual entries in the public Wikipedia. The less known Citizendium wiki was also considered. Adopting a design science approach, a first conceptual design for a EC-wide in-house knowledge wiki was developed and validated through two successive iterations using a simplified Delphi approach. A final conceptual design of this wiki was then prepared.

The study found that a system aiming at high quality of entries, allowing for a healthy breadth of substance-based opinions, covering a vast scope of subjects and offering security of operation can be designed. It is argued that visible authorship, allowing room for dissenting opinions, opting for non-public access of the entries and setting up a bibliometrics method to reward high-quality contribution to the system are essential elements to ensure its adoption and ultimate success.

The main limitation of the study is that the new system, yet to be accepted within the EC, is untested in a real situation. The paper should, therefore, be seen as an example of “design science” rather than an analysis of an already implemented system. It is surmised that more research is needed on preservation and growth of quality in wiki entries, and how ranking editors can contribute to that aim.

The Commipedia system proposed in the present paper will have practical positive implications in the EC discharge of its duties, which have constantly increased over the years at each revision of the EU treaties. A similar system can address similar needs of in-house knowledge management and talent management in large public and private organisations.

This paper fulfils the need to provide the EC with a way to cope with mobility and retirement of experienced officials, to retain their knowledge, distribute across its different departments, update and improve it and, additionally, reward expertise and talent of officials, increasing in turn their wish to contribute to Commipedia. Neither the EC nor other large multi-disciplinary organisations have such a general system at their disposal.

The purpose of this paper is to present extensions of Semantic MediaWiki for the purpose of technology forecast and technology monitoring. The user friendliness and applicability of the components is evaluated by task-based user studies.

Based on the requirements given by potential end users (technology experts), visualization possibilities were designed and implemented. Potential users used the new features of technology forecast and monitoring within a semantic wiki and were controlled regarding the effectiveness.

Although semantic wikis are ideal tools for knowledge management in industry settings, especially due to their user-friendly way of storing and retrieving knowledge, they have rarely been used for technology forecast and monitoring purposes so far. The authors show that the additional requirements for such purposes can be met and provide established technology analysis possibilities within Semantic MediaWiki. In that way, a new application area of Semantic MediaWiki is introduced.

Tools and techniques for Semantic MediaWiki are presented, opening the application area of Semantic MediaWiki for technology and innovation management. The research provides evidence that the open-source implemented visualization and storage techniques can be applied in real-world settings, where so far mainly costly dedicated software has had to be used.

To keep librarians and colleagues informed about the issues and programs of the Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L) Conference held in Atlanta, Georgia on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus in February 2007.

Provides a review of the conference.

Acquisitions staff, catalogers, public service staff, administrators, IT personnel, information providers from the vendor side, content managers, and others all came together to assess what needs to be done to continue high servicing of both born digital and electronically available resources in a hybrid environment that continues to describe all library settings today. As the percentage of electronic resources quickly grows, there are new challenges in acquiring, caring for, servicing, preserving, using and citing them that keep librarians up at night to consider short‐and long‐term solutions in how they should be organized bibliometrically and how we can re‐engineer some of our procedures to best treat the wide range of e‐Resources now common in all libraries.

The program blended services with processing reinforcing the importance of electronic resources for the “total” library environment. It seemed like there was nothing left out.