Editing anxiety in corporate wikis: From private drafting to public edits

Abstract

Wikis promote work to be reviewed after publication, not before. This vision might not always fit organizations where a common employee concern is that sharing work-in-progress may negatively affect the assessments they receive. This might lead users to edit in distress, thus affecting task performance, and may minimize their participation in wikis. On this premise, this work advocates for complementing wiki editing with in-line drafting. By “drafting” is meant the personal process of collecting references or gradually forging a new structure of ideas, till the result is good-enough to be published. By “in-line”, we highlight that drafts will end up being article edits, and as such, their elaboration should take place within the wiki rather than being offloaded to third-party tools. This vision is realized by Wikinote, an extension for Google Chrome that leverages MediaWiki’s Visual Editor with drafting facilities. First evidence indicates that Wikinote reduces contribution judgement anxiety, and to a lesser extent, editing anxiety.