Wikis for Knowledge Management: Business Cases, Best Practices, Promises, & Pitfalls

Abstract

Wiki technology has been successfully used for collaboration in various settings. Wikis are, however, rarely used in design engineering research. The authors’ research involved studying how design research occurs and how wikis can be used to support it. The authors observed, and report on, several instances of design research where wikis were used. We find that successful application of wikis depends on the software exhibiting certain characteristics. Some of these characteristics include: both WYSIWYG and “raw” editing modes, the ability to edit page elements without editing the entire page, and the ability to comment on or annotate content. To validate these findings, we are developing a new wiki, the intended user community of which are design researchers. While that development is still ongoing, we report early findings here.