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Motivating and enabling organizational memory with a workgroup wiki

Published: 08 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Workgroups can struggle with remembering past projects and sharing this information with other groups in the organization. In a case study of the deployment of MediaWiki as a publishing tool for building organizational memory, group members' motivation to document past projects increased. A browsable collection of past projects allowed for discovery of past work, building the reputation of individuals and the workgroup, and development of transactive memory within the workgroup. The "anyone can edit" feature, frequently touted as the main benefit of wikis, had both benefits and drawbacks in this implementation. Group members did not feel comfortable making substantial edits to others' content but did occasionally use the wiki to coauthor content and also categorize and link to others' content and fix typos, particularly when asked to help.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WikiSym '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis
September 2008
219 pages
ISBN:9781605581286
DOI:10.1145/1822258
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 September 2008

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Author Tags

  1. knowledge exchange
  2. knowledge transfer
  3. organizational memory
  4. organizations
  5. repositories
  6. wikis

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WikiSym08
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WikiSym08: 2008 International Symposium on Wikis
September 8 - 10, 2008
Porto, Portugal

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Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 145 submissions, 48%

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  • (2021)From Motivation and Self-Structure to a Decision-Support Framework for Online Social NetworksResearch Anthology on Decision Support Systems and Decision Management in Healthcare, Business, and Engineering10.4018/978-1-7998-9023-2.ch007(161-181)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2019)Epistemic motivation, task reflexivity, and knowledge contribution behavior on team wikisJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2412970:5(448-461)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2019
  • (2018)From Motivation and Self-Structure to a Decision-Support Framework for Online Social NetworksMultidisciplinary Perspectives on Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals10.4018/978-1-5225-5297-0.ch007(116-136)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2014)Reviewing Motivations for Engaging in Decision Support Social NetworksInternational Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals10.4018/ijhcitp.20140101015:1(1-14)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014
  • (2014)The impact of identity on anxiety during wiki editing in higher educationJournal of Enterprise Information Management10.1108/JEIM-09-2012-005727:1(56-65)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2014
  • (2013)Wikis as knowledge management systems: issues and challengesJournal of Systems and Information Technology10.1108/1328726131132889515:2(189-201)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2013
  • (2012)Integrating decision support and social networksAdvances in Human-Computer Interaction10.1155/2012/5742762012(9-9)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
  • (2011)Wiki grows upProceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration10.1145/2038558.2038570(63-71)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2011
  • (2011)Planning for a Successful Corporate WikiDigital Enterprise and Information Systems10.1007/978-3-642-22603-8_38(425-439)Online publication date: 2011
  • (2010)Different contributor profiles in an organizational wikiProceedings of the Workshop on Open Source and Design of Communication10.1145/1936755.1936757(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2010
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