Studies on editing patterns in large-scale wikis

Abstract

Wiki systems have developed over the past years as lightweight, community-editable, web-based hypertext systems. With the emergence of Semantic Wikis, these collections of interlinked documents have also gained a dual role as ad-hoc RDF graphs. However, their roots lie at the limited hypertext capabilities of the World Wide Web: embedded links, without support for composite objects or transclusion. In this chapter, we present experimental evidence that hyperstructure changes, as opposed to content changes, form a substantial proportion of editing effort on a large-scale wiki.We then follow this with a in-detail experiment, studying how individual editors work to edit articles on the wiki. These experiments are set in the wider context of a study of how the technologies developed during decades of hypertext research may be applied to improve management of wiki document structure and, with semantic wikis, knowledge structure. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.