Mail2Wiki: low-cost sharing and organization on wikis

Abstract

Sharing and organizing content using corporate wikis remains prohibitively costly for most knowledge workers in organizations. This problem has led to low adoption rates, compromising the utility of such tools. To reduce these costs and increase the benefits we introduce two proof-of-concept prototypes. We characterize the lifecycle of production and consumption of shared knowledge in a community of professionals that use wikis as CIorg tools. That is, we analyze breakdowns or gaps in the current lifecycle, identify interventions that can improve it, and specify requirements for different roles involved in it. Then, we illustrate the design of the two prototypes that support users in feeding information into wikis and curating this information for better exploitation. First, we present an email plugin that allows knowledge workers to easily feed new content into their wiki sites directly from the email client (see workshop theme Feeding CIorg). Second, we present a MediaWiki plugin that allows wiki curators to update and organize the content shared on the wikis via a combination of machine-based functions and human input on interactive visualizations (see workshop theme Exploiting CIorg). The two prototypes were motivated by the same vision and were developed using an iterative and participatory design approach (see workshop theme Design Methods).