AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON CRITERIA FOR ASSESSING INFORMATION QUALITY IN CORPORATE WIKIS (Completed academic paper) Therese Friberg University of Paderborn, Germany Institute for Mechatronics and Design Engineering friberg@cik.upb.de Wolfgang Reinhardt University of Paderborn, Germany Department of Computer Science wolle@upb.de Abstract: Wikis gain more and more attention as tool for corporate knowledge management. The usage of corporate wikis differs from public wikis like the Wikipedia as there are hardly any wiki wars or copyright issues. Nevertheless the quality of the available articles is of high importance in corporate wikis as well as in public ones. This paper presents the results from an empirical study on criteria for assessing information quality of articles in corporate wikis. Therefore existing approaches for assessing information quality are evaluated and a specific wiki-set of criteria is defined. This wiki-set was examined in a study with participants from 21 different German companies using wikis as essential part of their knowledge management toolbox. Furthermore this paper discusses various ways for the automatic and manual rating of information quality and the technical implementation of such an IQ-profile for wikis. Key Words: Information Quality, Corporate Wikis, Information Quality Criteria, Empirical Study INTRODUCTION The largest and most well known representative of wikis is Wikipedia [28], which exists since 2001. Today Wikipedia is biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet with more the 67 million US-visitors as of June 2009 [23], 75,000 active contributors and 13 million articles in 260 languages, thereof more than 2.9 million in English [28]. The success of Wikipedia is founded on its free availability and possibility to collaborate in it [31]. Wikis attain increasing importance in nowadays community and for the knowledge management in enterprises. The popularity of wikis is based on the fact that they enable an effective archiving, organizing and sharing of data to the users. Writing in a wiki is a transparent process for the users on which they can collaborate actively. Furthermore the performed work is directly viewable in the system, which has a positive effect on the user’s motivation. Wikis inside of organizations, called corporate wikis, differ from the free accessible ones primarily in the fact that they have explicit access control. That means that the entrance to selected areas can be restricted to certain user groups. In the further process corporate wikis stand in the foreground and hence, they build the context of this examination. One of the biggest problems concerning the growing content of wikis is the uncertainty of quality of the input. The important advantage of the open access causes simultaneously an enormous problem because each person is able to add, delete, or modify information without a previous review-process independent from the fact if an article gets improved or declined through it. Especially inside of organizations wrong or missing information produce enormous costs. A survey of Information Builders GmbH shows that 54% of 610 asked managers see the biggest barrier against making good decisions is inconsistent, deficient, and incomplete information in organizations [18]. So using a wiki inside an organization is followed by

the question about the quality of information. A credible assessment of the quality of the content on a platform intensifies the trust in knowledge management system and increases the confidence of the user [9]. To satisfactorily answer the question about the information quality is has to be clarified by which criteria it is determined and which factors play a major role concerning the rating of these criteria. Therefore we have developed a set of information quality criteria adapted for corporate wikis. Afterwards this set has been verified by a survey with authentic users of corporate wikis. With the results from the study we optimized the identified wiki-set to provide an optimal assessment of information quality in corporate wikis. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: first the background of the research and related work is referred. Afterwards the wiki-set to assess information quality inside of organizations is derived. After presenting the conducted study and its results, technical approaches for realizing the wiki-set are identified. The paper closes with a conclusion and outlook on future research. STATE-OF-THE-ART AND BACKGROUND You can hardly find examinations concerning the analysis of information quality in corporate wikis. Studies focusing the information quality of articles in Wikipedia show that there can evolve articles with high quality content and that these articles can even be gauged with nameable, paper-based, and peer-reviewed encyclopedias [12,15,29]. These findings confirm the existing potential that a wiki can contain high quality articles. In the past a lot of researchers have defined criteria catalogues to define the determination of information quality. Only a few of them focused on wikis and often the criteria are hardly feasible. Hence, to achieve a criteria catalogue for corporate wikis, we had to make adaptations of the existing ones. As [21] emphasize, criteria of information quality vary with the context in which they are used. So we had to regard the corporate context in detail. We present some of the existing criteria catalogues in the following section with the intention to build a base for the definition of the so-called wiki-set to determine information quality in corporate wikis. The authors in [26] developed a set of 15 information quality criteria under intensive embracing of answers from participants of arranged surveys. The authors have derived a criteria catalogue, which contains the most important criteria to assess information quality from the perspective of users. The framework of [7] also contains 15 criteria, which primarily focus information in databases. The setting plays an important role in the subsequent literature and hence it has been included in the development of the wiki-set. [1] developed a framework with six criteria by focusing Internet pages. The authors created an often-cited catalogue and offer some interesting viewpoints to determine the wiki-set. By analyzing existing frameworks [8] generated a model with 16 criteria for information quality. The analysis was done by literature research and empirical studies. The framework of [4] focuses wikis in detail and contains nine different criteria. The author analyzes the articles of Wikipedia based on criteria catalogues developed for news. [14] have developed a framework with eight criteria, which defines information quality during transactions on the Internet. The author sees the determination of information quality as a process during which a message can become a benefit. The framework of Wikipedia [29] consists of ten criteria, which shall intend the quality of the published articles on the platform. The set of criteria is still used by the community of Wikipedia to assess the information quality of the written output. The strong focusing on a wiki offers huge potential for developing the wiki-set. APPLIED METHOD The following section describes the derivation of the wiki-set to assess information quality in corporate wikis.