=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-536/paper-2
|storemode=property
|title=Collaborative Moderation - Fostering Creativity with a Corporate Wiki
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-536/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-536
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ectel/DenchevaPZ09
}}
==Collaborative Moderation - Fostering Creativity with a Corporate Wiki==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-536/paper2.pdf
Collaborative Moderation — Fostering
Creativity with a Corporate Wiki
Silviya Dencheva1 , Christian R. Prause1 , and Andreas Zimmermann1
Fraunhofer Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik,
Schloss Birlinghoven, 53754 St. Augustin, Germany
{silviya.dencheva,christian.prause,andreas.zimmermann}@fit.fraunhofer.de
Abstract. Voluntary participation in a corporate Wiki can be low due to
personal priority preference. But high participation of professionals is necessary
to enable group innovation through a Wiki. We present a tool that offers re-
wards to committed users, and triggers a sportive competition that fosters the
creativity process through knowledge exchange.
1 Introduction
Creativity is the human’s ability to solve problems in a way that is initially novel
but ultimately acceptable in a culture. Finding such solutions often depends on
the collaboration of multiple individuals. Modern means of communication open
up opportunities for entirely new ways of computer supported collaboration in
creativity processes. Creativity processes are characterized by different dimen-
sions like synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, long vs. short term, or
planned vs. ad-hoc processes. De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” method [1] is a
typical example of a synchronous, short duration, face-to-face and planned cre-
ativity process. Recent achievements in information technology such as video
conferencing support such creativity processes or even enable all new ones.
This paper investigates on employing a Wiki as a creativ-
ity process that is typically asynchronous, long term, remote,
and ad-hoc. In 1995, Ward Cunningham invented the Wiki
principle [2] aiming at replacing static web pages with dy-
namic ones that can be edited online. A Wiki supports the
free exchange of ideas in a group of people that are spatially
distributed. All they need is Internet access. As the largest
and most popular Wiki, Wikipedia represents a success story
and covers more than 2.7 million English articles written by
over 285,000 users1 . Wikipedia interlinks the knowledge of Fig. 1. A simple
many different people, and thus, combines own knowledge Wiki review form
and views with those of others.
However, a Wiki is not geared towards solving a specific problem, since the
writers cannot anticipate what results they will finally obtain. All participants
share their knowledge voluntarily and in their spare time (see Section 2). A Wiki
requires a moderation process, in order to channel the contributions and ideas
1
http://stats.wikimedia.org/DE/TablesRecentTrends.htm January, 20th 2007
into a certain direction, and thus, become a support mechanism for creativity.
Moderation also helps to reduce destructive conflicts among engaged individu-
als, prevents the discussion from getting polluted with superfluous information,
and ensures a fair distribution of attention. Numerous social rating tools exist
for Wikis (e.g. MediaWiki Review 2 extension, see figure 1) but the feedback is
confined to an article and does not touch the authors; going beyond this border
is hence necessary for moderation.
This paper presents an approach towards collaborative moderation in a cor-
porate Wiki that enables a group of professionals to collaboratively drive the
creativity process (see Section 3). Instead of an external moderator prescribing
the discussion of certain topics, the group moderates and manages itself. The
impressions and comments of the group are fed back into a rating system that
takes over moderation and thereby gears the Wiki’s evolvement towards the right
direction (see Section 4). The paper describes the initial phase of a study of a
long-term creativity process supported by a collaboratively moderated Wiki.
2 Participation and Moderation in a Wiki Process
Thousands of people worldwide use Wikipedia; willing to share their knowledge
and manpower for free or for the reputation of participating creatively and ac-
tively in such a huge project - a world wide online encyclopedia. In contrast, the
users of a corporate Wiki represent a small working group consisting of employ-
ees. If the Wiki principle should work for a company information system then
active contribution of every workgroup member is required.
Conducting an inquiry and observing long-term usage of our department
corporate Wiki revealed interesting findings. The Wiki’s content does not display
much variety of topics, articles have a short length and their number is quite
small. Much content should be upgraded or extended so that the meaning of the
current subject becomes clearer. Readers, who are not familiar with the subject,
are unable to quickly understand such articles and extract valuable information
from them. Furthermore, there are obsolete articles that have not been updated
for a long time, and therefore represent inappropriate or outdated knowledge.
Members of the workgroup use the Wiki very little, and thus, new entries are
written infrequently and only few extensions to existing articles are made. Due
to heavy workload and an unknowable benefit from investing one’s own time
in sharing knowledge, people typically put a lower priority on working with the
Wiki. They experience few individual benefits or rewards for themselves as indi-
viduals compared to the effort and time they invest, which results in decreased
motivation. When analysing the inquiry, we identified five key requirements:
– a continuous participation in extending the Wiki content must be achieved
to change the users’ attitude from consumption towards contribution,
– an increased amount of topics in the Wiki is necessary to extend the infor-
mation not only quantitatively but also thematically,
2
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Review
– an increased motivation of the participating users is necessary to take the
initiative of extending the Wiki content by themselves,
– an improved article quality is required to allow for more effective and more
efficient knowledge transfer between participants, and
– an increased knowledge exchange is needed to direct and guide creativity
within the group.
We think that lacking moderation in a corporate Wiki leads to insufficient
communication, collaboration and cooperation between the team members. A
certain organization body which controls the working process and encourages
the writers would increase efficiency and the quality of results. The following
chapter describes how a collaboratively moderated corporate Wiki addresses the
enumerated requirements and unleashes the creativity of the working group.
3 Utilizing Community Feedback for Wiki Moderation
An important issue in the companies is how to motivate personnel to high perfor-
mance. Basically, the workforce can be motivated through the promotion of inner
satisfaction with the own work and identification with joint norms; or through
external rewards, punishment or force [3]. However, it is practically impossible
to directly influence the intrinsic motivation of humans. It is only possible to try
to motivate humans with the aid of external factors, and to awaken their inter-
est for the activity itself or its subject. Yet enforcing a certain kind of behavior
would require issuing instructions by superiors. This would be contradicting to
the idea of self-organizing groups and self-reliant creativity.
There are two methods to motivate the employees extrinsically namely by
rewards and punishments, which are based on negative or positive stimulus va-
lence. Better results are achieved with rewards because the personnel gets the
impression that it earns something for its efforts [4]. Punishments are inherently
unpleasant and easily become a dead end for motivation.
Our concept is to reward individuals who provide the community with in-
teresting, valuable and high quality contributions. In a Web 2.0 fashion the
consumers of information review the quality of the articles they read and feed
this information back into an information system. The information system then
accumulates the different opinions and thereby democratically determines the
quality of an article. This kind of interaction is quite common in the various
Web 2.0 applications. We take the concept one step further, and not only deter-
mine the quality of articles but also find out who is responsible for an article and
assign different weights to articles. Combining article quality, responsibility and
weight we are able to determine individual contribution scores for every user.
We hope to trigger a beneficial and sportive competition for high quality
information exchange among contributors. Depending on quality and quantity of
their contributions users win awards (e.g. gain levels that are presented as funny
icons similar to the levels of Wakoopa3 depicted in Figure 2, and described in
Section 4.2).
3
http://wakoopa.com/about/reputation\#awards
Fig. 2. The reputation levels from Wakoopa.
4 Realizing Collaborative Moderation
This section explains the implementation, including calculations performed by
the backend, and shows how user interfaces work.
4.1 Determining Personal Scores
CollabReview is a rating tool for an increasing source code quality. Developers
while working with code form an impression of it. The tool then enables them
to capture their impressions and manifest them in a rating which is then used to
identify good and bad code. In combination with the responsibility determination
this should effectively prevent cowboy-coding [5].
Personal scores are the basis on which rewards are granted. Similar to Col-
labReview the scores are obtained through combination of three values:
The Quality of an article is determined democratically. It is the average
rating users gave to the article by writing reviews (see Figure 3(b).) Every user
has at most one review per article at a time but is able to update his review
whenever he wishes to. As an article is considered to be under continuous change
a review might refer to an earlier revision of it; a review might be no longer com-
pletely accurate but also not be completely out-of-date. We therefore determine
how much an article has changed since submission of the review and weight
reviews by timeliness.
The Responsibility describes how much an individual contributor influ-
enced the collaboratively written article. This value enables distributing scores
to contributors and is the percentage of sentences he modified or added. Respon-
sibility information per author is obtained by comparing the different article re-
visions. It is computed at a textual level using a modified Levenshtein distance:
we determine the sentence insertions and deletions that transform one revision
into the next. The user who added or modified a sentence is its author.
The Weight is an article’s importance. Articles with higher importance
score more points and thereby attract attention and commitment. Determining
interesting articles is crucial for collaborative moderation as it sets the Wiki’s
evolution direction. We considered several strategies but have not yet decided
which ones are best to combine:
– User-defined: users provide feedback on how important they deem an article.
– Viewing frequency: attracting attention from users indicates importance.
– Change frequency: frequent changes indicate importance in a similar way.
– Search: many queries for article or its key words through the search menu.
– Keywords: presence of designated keywords makes articles more important.
– Navigation paths: important articles appear early in navigation paths.
– Timeliness: recent changes indicate current interest for an article.
– Length: for fairness reasons longer articles should award more score points.
– Backward links: referenced articles are deemed important by other authors.
– PageRank: advanced weighting of Backward links method.
– Forward links: interconnecting the Wiki by references makes important.
– Viewing time: articles that keep users attracted are more interesting.
– Observers: being on many people’s Watch List indicates article importance.
4.2 User Interface
This is the description of the user interfaces that are integrated into the Medi-
aWiki software to provide the new functionalities.
Collecting User Feedback Reviews are submitted using a form embedded
in all article pages. The form consists of several rating buttons and a text area
to add comments on how the page could be improved (see Figure 3 (a)). It is
directly visible hence users can easily submit new reviews or update earlier ones.
Fig. 3. Wiki extensions: (a) reviewing an article, (b) showing ratings, (c) user ranking.
Presenting Scores and Awards to Users Our reward system gives points to
users for contributing to important and well-rated articles. The system includes
the following components:
– Level hierarchy: Every user has a level, initially starting as a newbie. A new
level is reached if the user has acquired a certain number of points. Each
level has an indication and a corresponding funny icon.
– Ranking List: The ranks of all users are listed in a table, which is announced
on the Wiki main page so that everybody can see it (see Figure 3 (c)).
– Awards: Users can win awards for outstanding performance (in a certain
time interval), e.g. “Wiki-Author of the Week”, that are attached to their
accounts. Award winners are published on the main page of the Wiki using
their photo, level-icon and awards.
5 Conclusion and Future Work
Writing articles in a Wiki constitutes a creativity process. Yet voluntary par-
ticipation in a corporate Wiki turns out to be very low due to various reasons.
We present collaborative moderation as a way to motivate group members to
actively contribute to the exchange of ideas in order to foster creativity and
group innovation. The concept builds upon rewarding individuals who provide
the community with interesting, valuable and high quality contributions. Our
Wiki plug-in allows participants to provide feedback for an article. Quality, re-
sponsibility and weight values determine which rewards authors receive.
In the next step we prepare and conduct an appropriate user study. The re-
sults will reveal how the rewarding system triggers a sportive competition among
Wiki users. Furthermore, we will analyse to which degree such a collaborative
moderation fosters the creativity process through knowledge exchange.
Acknowledgment
This research has been supported by the Hydra EU project (IST-2005-034891).
We thank Markus Eisenhauer and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
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