Resumen:
1 An outline about the rationales and contribution of this work Companies are increasingly realizing the benets of wikis [2]. As any other In- formation System, the interplay of technology, work practice, and organization is paramount to achieve successful wiki deployments. Documentation, organi- grams, project milestones are all there by the time the wiki is created. This Wikipediacontrasts with open wikis (e.g., ) where the community did not exist prior to the wiki. As a result, corporate wikis (i.e., wikis host by an existing organization) might be tuned at the onset to the already existing information ecosystem. This is the assumption behind Wiki Scaolding. Next paragraphs Whatintroduce the what, the why and the how of this term. . Wiki Scaolding stands for a wiki installation (a.k.a. a wiki project) that is available from the wiki’s onset, before any contribution is made. Such installation mirrors the practices of the hosting organization. Some examples follow: (1) company schedulings might impact the pace at which wiki articles are provided (e.g., deadlines, project milestones); (2) products, services, customers or established terminology within an organization might become categories to classify wiki articles; (3) employees eligible to contribute, and their access control permissions, might be based on the company’s organigram. A Wiki Scaolding Whycaptures this setting as a wiki installation. . The fact that wikis facilitate knowledge creation does not imply that such knowledge comes out of the blue. Both, the paralysis of facing an empty article and the lack of a holistic view of the wiki content, might prevent grassroot initiatives from getting o the ground. At this respect, Wiki Scaolding brings three main benets: 1. Wikis are frequently a bottom-up phenomenon whereby the wiki is introduced by an individual employee or a small group within the organization without the support of management. This approach may be useful to uncover hidden knowledge or hidden ways-of-working in a dynamic and unplanned way. However, it might fail in having a strategic intent. A lack of strategy might result in no clear guidelines about what, how and who should contribute. If so, Wiki Scaolding forces to think about these concerns right from the beginning. Wiki Scaolding promotes user engagement. In a corporate setting, a wiki article might require some permissions, be subject to a deadline, belong to some wiki categories, or follow a given template. All these aspects might not be directly related with the article’s content as such, yet they frame the contribution. Setting this frame is cumbersome and delays users in putting their wheels in motion (e.g., start to edit the article). Wiki Scaolding permits this frame to be available by the time contributors start their articles. 3. Wiki Scaolding as a wiki map. The rules of practice that govern a site (i.e., roles, access rights, templates, etc) should be easily accessible to new- comers. So far, this information is scattered around the wiki, and frequently READMEhidden in administrative pages. At best, a page can provide some textual description of these practices. Wiki Scaolding can play the role of an initial practice sitemap . Newcomers can consult the scaolding to have an eye-bird view of the rules that govern the wiki’s operation. How. We introduce the notion of Wiki Scaolding, and advocate for the use of Wiki Scaolding Lan-DSLs as the engineer means. Specically, we introduce the guage (WSL) (pronounced whistle). WSL is built on top of FreeMind [1], a pop- ular, open source tool to create mind maps. You create your scaolding by draw- ing mind maps. Next, you can export your mind map as a Wiki Scaolding: a new wiki is created along the lines of the directives of the scaolding (see a video of WSL at work at http://vimeo.com/31548363). The source code, examples and installation instructions can be found at http: // www. onekin. org/ wsl . FreeMindAlternatively, WSL source code is also available in the ocial repos- itory http://bit.ly/xsA040. The extension of this work to handle wiki refac- toring is also available at [3]. Acknowledgments This work is co-supported by the Spanish Ministry of Ed- (Scrip-ucation, and the European Social Fund under contract TIN2011-23839 tongue). Puente has a doctoral grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science & Education.
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