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November 16, 2005Corporate Wiki Research
Moritz Ostwald writes about the Backbone Media Corporate blogging survey and asks the question does a similar study exist on corporate wikis?
Not that I know, however, I do know that Wikimania is coming to Boston, MA in 2006. I think there may be some presentations on that subject at that conference. As a prediction social networking software will provide more ways for the public, customers and companies to solve their data analysis issues. I think the challenge for any company is how do you build a wiki community that is open to the whole web without involving your competitors. I don't think you can, really it’s the leaders who gain the most respect and credibility who will win in this new age of web 2.0. Those companies and people who do have the foresight to engage everyone to provide a better resource for the commons will succeed. These are not wiki examples, but look at eBay and craigslist.org.
Posted by johncass at November 16, 2005 5:50 PM
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Comments
Wikimania is not the only place for Wiki research. There are at least two calls for papers at the moment. There has been at least one serious survey about Wikipedia contributors motivation and two masters theses on a corporate wiki (but unpublished).
Posted by: jakob at January 27, 2006 2:39 PM
Hi Jakob,
I welcome your link to the wiki site on wiki research, but I think I must disagree with you about Wikimania not being the place for wiki research. If not at Wikimania where else, as Wikipedia is the largest wiki and best known on the web. What's your reasoning behind that comment?
John
Posted by: John Cass at January 27, 2006 2:49 PM
My reasoning is that I was member of the Wikimania programme committee last year and this year I'm not ;-) Frankly I hope that there will also be interesting wiki research at Wikimania but I'm more looking to meet the Wikimedia community. Don't expect a scientifc call for papers and detailed review process. Wikimania is mainly organised by voluteers that don't have time for such stuff while most people that organise a scientific conference (like WikiSym) at least have a paid job at some university.
Posted by: Jakob at January 27, 2006 4:38 PM
That's interesting Jakob, what did you get out of the event at Wikimania last year?
I was recently asked to join the society of new communications research as a fellow. Along with academics lots of business people like myself are involved. While we don't have the credentials academics do, I think that the business communities is just as interested in research in the area of online social networking. My main interest is in blogs at the moment. But I think wiki's can be powerful tools for citizens and companies. Wikipedia is a great tool for community, but I tend to use it mainly for business, looking up business bio's is especially useful.
Posted by: John Cass at January 29, 2006 6:15 PM
Wikipedia lends itself to a certain type of research, primarily on large-scale Internet communities. There are a large number of corporate wikis that aren't anything like Wikipedia, and follow very different usage patterns. Wikimania and the Wiki Symposium overlap (certainly on Wikipedia research) but tend to have different audiences. If you look at last year's WikiSym proceedings you can get a feeling for how these two conferences differ.
Posted by: Dirk Riehle at April 12, 2006 10:30 AM
Dirk, perhaps you'd be kind enough to give me a quick synopsis of the diferences between the two conferences here?
Posted by: john cass at April 12, 2006 12:00 PM
