Factors affecting shapers of organizational wikis

Abstract

New Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis permit any organizational member of a virtual community of practice (CoP) to dynamically edit, integrate, and rewrite content (what we call knowledge shaping) as well as contribute personal knowledge. Previous research on factors that motivate contribution in virtual CoPs has focused exclusively on factors explaining why people contribute their personal knowledge, with no research focused on why people make the knowledge-shaping contributions (rewriting, integrating, and restructuring pages) which are possible with wikis. We hypothesize that factors that explain frequency of contribution will be different for those who shape from those who contribute only their personal knowledge. The results support our hypotheses. In addition, we find that shapers are not more likely to be managers or members of a community's core group who might typically serve in an administrator role, contrary to prior expectations. The implications of using Web 2.0 tools to encourage this shaping behavior are discussed.

The Not-So-Open Wikis: Structures of Collaboration At Work

“…For instance, a wiki is described as a tool for open and social knowledge collaboration that allows anyone to create and edit content collaboratively. It consists of a set of dynamic web pages that are continuously updated by communities of people [30,7]. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wiki, provided a number of principles that characterize the nature of a wiki such as open, simple, incremental, organic, etc.…”

“…In principle, a wiki is open and allows its users to jointly create, edit, change, and delete content [24]. It also allows for knowledge shaping which is a purposeful activity to transform existing knowledge on the wiki into more useful knowledge through reorganizing, rewriting, and integrating content [30].…”

“…In this respect, given their potential, organizations continue to apply and use wikis at the workplace [30,16,27,7]. As such, wikis are often used by professional communities for knowledge collaboration and sharing [5,30].…”

“…As such, wikis are often used by professional communities for knowledge collaboration and sharing [5,30]. For instance, wikis can be used as conversational knowledge management tools where by which individuals and groups create and share knowledge through collaborative dialogues and conversations [6].…”

“…[16,30,3,28,9,8]). However, this research lacks the focus on understanding sociostructural dynamics of using wikis at work and how these dynamics shape social collaboration and sharing.…”