[wiki-research] Research on the use of wikis in design teams

[jameskara]

Hi Uri,

Your tool sounds very interesting. I am interested in collecting usage
statistics for corporate wiki installations with the view of developing
some metrics that can be used in a wiki incentive program.

As a 'wiki consultant', I find that one of the biggest challenges for
establishing a healthy wiki culture is getting people to actually use
the wiki.  I find that once people start using the wiki, they are
usually very happy with it, but it is a large task to get people on
board. One of the approaches some companies like to take is to have an
incentive program, but until now I have not come up with a good way to
manage such a program, because it is very hard to measure the quality or
quantity of a given persons input into a wiki.

Do you think that your tool could be used to build wiki usage metrics
that could be used for an incentive program?

Regards,

James Matheson
www.saikore.com


Uri Dekel wrote:
> Since it appears that several researchers are planning studies of actual
> Wiki use, I want to mention the EMOOSE tool, developed at Carnegie Mellon,
> which (among other features) offer the capability to monitor how clients
> interact with a given Wiki page (or other web applications), and record the
> information in a central location where it can later be mined. Naturally,
> this can only apply for future collections.
>
> Our collection method is based on making simple instrumentations to a Wiki
> (we have tested this successfully on MediaWiki), so that a script is
> included in the generated HTML page, which frequently reports to the
> collection framework (via a forwarding CGI on the server) about the current
> viewport, the structure of the document, etc. Thus, one can identify what
> parts of a long Wiki article are viewed at each time, and correlate
> concurrent use of multiple Wiki pages. This does not require changes to the
> browser, and does not trace a user's activity once he has left the Wiki for
> other web sites. 
>
> This information can complement the (limited) information from the server
> side, since the Wiki can only trace served requests and submitted changes.
>
> The tool is currently a research prototype at CMU, which I can make
> available to interested parties.
>
> I would also like to find "volunteers" willing to test this out on their
> public Wikis, as validation for an upcoming WikiSym paper submission...
>
> Cheers,
> Uri Dekel
> Carnegie Mellon University
>
>
> On 1/9/07 6:49 PM, "Jiranida Ph" <jiranida at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hi all wiki researchers,
>>
>>  I'm Ammy Jiranida Phuwanartnurak, a doctoral candidate at the
>> Information School, University of Washington.  I'm working on my
>> dissertation, which will investigate the use of wikis in an
>> interdisciplinary (or cross-functional) design/development project.
>> The research objectives are to: (1) examine how design teams currently
>> use wiki technology and its effectiveness in sharing information
>> during the design process; and (2) inform how wikis could be
>> implemented and appropriated to better support information sharing for
>> interdisciplinary design.
>>
>> In addition to conducting field studies of 3-5 design teams that use
>> wikis, I plan to analyze the content and log (history) of roughly
>> 10-20 project wikis used by design teams.  I'm interested in general
>> statistics like # wiki pages, # users, #changes for each page, etc.
>> So, I'm looking for a tool that can help me do this kind of analysis.
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>>
>> Thank you very much :)
>> Ammy
>> _______________________________________________
>>     
>
>
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