Wikis in Organizations

The Lorenz curve is a graphical representation of social inequality of some sort. For example, economists use it to display the income distribution for households. The Gini coefficient further condenses the Lorenz curve into a single measure. And last in line is the Pareto principle, sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule, which is a frequent observation of a certain distribution of of social inequality.

All of these well-known concepts easily apply to research on corporate and public wikis. A first shot is to plot the cummulative distribution of revisions against users to gain an insight into the inequality of work done in wikis. Of course, whether or not revisions are a good measure for work is arguable, not the least because the quality of revisions is a completely different issue.

At any rate, Jimmy Wales claims that the top 2% of all Wikipedians account for more than 80% of the work in total. Not so much Pareto, obviously. Still, his claim is rather well informed, as our below plot confirms.

What’s more interesting is that corporate wikis very well display the 80-20 rule. So there you go, another hint that corporate wikis don’t obey the laws of the public sphere where people come and go as they please. After all, membership in an organization more or less establishes a firm user base of corporate wikis, especially if there is no other means to and end. The silver bullet for making your wiki a success is thus to give your employees no other choice of media.

Web 2.0 is little more than a buzzword. Then again, there are applications and services out on the Internet that defer the logic of the old world. I recently co-edited a book with Paul Alpar which addresses the Web 2.0 from an empirical perspective.

There are four chapters on wikis. Klaus Stein and Claudia Hess discuss reputation as a mechanism which excellent articles in Wikipedia strive from. Anja Ebersbach, Knut Krimmel, and Alexander Warta derive several measures for the analysis of corporate wikis. Claudia Müller takes on wikis in terms of knowledge management. And last but not least, I scale up from communication to collaboration to better understand corporate wikis.

The table of content reveals a little more: The first part of the book focuses on weblogs, part two takes on wikis, part three deals with social network sites, and part four with social news. Be sure to check it out.

Take Wikipedia, get rid of all its help, user, and discussion pages — and your basically left with articles, definitions, and stubs. That’s the core of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia we all love (and some of us hate, mainly for plagiarism by students). Now, take a guess of how many percent all the articles make up of the core. My gut feeling was a lot, say, 90+ percent or so, which isn’t that far off. According to Voss (2005, p. 6), it’s somewhere between 90 and 95 percent (for the German Wikipedia), depending on what counts as a stub. So far, so good.

But Wikipedia is open to the public, that is, to most of the Internet users worldwide (’cept China, e.g.). That’s certainly different for any corporate wiki. An interesting question is thus, just How much of Wikipedia is in your wiki? Or, in other words, What is the percentage of articles in corporate wikis?

In our research project, we have access to a couple of corporate wikis. The data keeps rollin’ in and among the first things I did was to strip one of the wikis off all help, user, and discussion pages. I was left with a little more than 700 pages in total. Far smaller than the claimed two million articles of the English Wikipedia, of course, yet a manageable size to apply some genre analysis.

So, 700+ pages of qualitative data analysis later, I took the below screenshot (yes, screenshot, Graphviz wouldn’t render the PNG in time, whereas the DOT itself only took a couple of minutes).

Nodes are pages and edges are links between pages. The network is pretty dense (I’ll calculate some measures later on), spotting somewhat more than 2.500 links among the 700+ pages. The red nodes are articles as one would expect them to find in Wikipedia, that is, they are pieces of writing covering a particular topic, they are structured in a particular manner (e.g., introduction, body, conclusion), and they are authored by members of the organization. All in all there are 68 articles out of the 700+ pages. That’s a little less than 10 percent — and quite a different picture from Wikipedia.

To be honest, a little less than another third of all the pages in this corporate wiki are actually articles, too. But they are more or less copy & paste works from already published articles. I decided to name them features just to distinguish them from articles by organizational members. Features serve the same function as articles, that is, they cover a particular topic, and so on. However, in terms of wiki functionality, they are simply mirrors of someone else’s work outside the membership of the organization. Features are of lesser interest since they don’t come about the (cooperative) authoring of organizational members. Still, articles and features taken together barely make up 40 percent of the corporate wiki!?

Back to the articles that are actually of interest. Take a closer look at the following subnetwork of only articles and other pages the articles link to or are linked from.

The articles are fairly well linked among the other pages. However, among the articles themselves, there are hardly any links at all (it’s hard to see, but I colored the inter-article links in red, too). This suggests that the articles cover substantially different topics — and looking at the articles themselves reveals this assumption to be just right.

These first findings suggest a couple of additional questions, for example, What genres do we find in corporate wikis other than articles and the expected definitions and stubs?, Are those other genres also found in other corporate communication media (e.g., in coroporate blogs, document management systems, etc.)?, and, if not, Are those other genres in any way innovative means for the organization?

I’ll follow up on those question in a later post

A’ight, our weblog is not officially online. But there is somewhat of an urgent need for me to write up today’s DG PuK keynote speech given by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia (as y’all know). The topic is rather broad: ”Wikipedia, Wikia and The Future” (sic!). I guess Jimmy has given this speech a couple of times now, for he never even updated some dates on the slides. Ah, what do you know, he’s some sort of pop idol, so it doesn’t really matter what he talks about. Let’s not focus to much on what he was saying but on how he presented his and apparently the common interest of mankind or, in better words, how he persuaded the audience to embark on his philosphy.

So, there is Wikipedia, there is Wikia, and a search engine like project under the, I assume, working title Wikia Search. We all know Wikipedia, some of us have visited Wikia, and none of us have actually used Wikia Search. My feeling is that there is not a lot there, at least not yet. Jimmy was very excited that Jeremie Miller, who brought us Jabber, is on bord for the new project. OK, that’s one. But it takes a lot more people to bring a Google Killer to life. (Jimmy doesn’t see his project as a threat to Google, particularly since Google is a lot more than just a search engine.) He was reluctant to disclose any details about how Wikia Search will work. It will rely on GPL software, which means all page rank or whatever algorithms are transparent. It will offer open APIs, so anyone can make use of it. And its content will be licensed just the way Wikipedia is. All very honorable steps in building a success story.

Apropos honor. Jimmy is cautious about overrelying on hard- and software. It’s the people, always the people, so, honor to the people. Community of passion in analogy to community of practice comes to mind. Not the least because love and passion are two central issues in Jimmy’s philosophy. Such a universal belief in the greater good of people is unique, somewhat naive, but certainly inspiring.

After the keynote and the usual answers & questions I had the chance to have lunch with Jimmy. My first impression that he’s a genuinely nice guy wasn’t disappointed. There is passion in all he says, that’s for sure. In his own words, literally, he’s just a guy who hangs out with rock stars (Bono, for one) and politicians (Tony Blair etc.). Don’t we all.