Wagner and Bolloju (2005) portrayed the three technologies, discussion forums, wikis, and weblogs (or blogs) as conversational technologies. Conversational technologies facilitate processes in which knowledge creation and storage is carried out through a discussion forum where participants contribute to the discussion with questions and answers, or through a blog that is typified by a process of storytelling, or through a wiki using collaborative writing. Constructivist learning theorists (Vygotsky, 1978; Leidner and Jarvenpaa, 1995) explain that the process of expressing knowledge aids its creation, and conversations benefit the refinement of knowledge. Cheung et al. (2005) maintains that conversational knowledge management fulfils this purpose because conversations, for example questions and answers, become the source of relevant knowledge.
It is our contention that new and exciting issues of information processing and knowledge management arise as a result of these conversational technologies infiltrating organisations. They are becoming almost ubiquitous in some circles but are raising controversies in others. However, studies of these phenomena are only now beginning to appear in the literature. An informative study of online discussion groups was undertaken by Timbrell et al. (2005), drawing out the particular language and associated behaviour that has emerged in this arena, including things such as patterns of posting, the active core (about 30% of members), seeding of threads, self-imposed netiquette, moderation, lurking, etc. Such studies are made possible because these technologies leave a permanent and structured electronic record of the social phenomena being studied.
According to Semple (2006), blogs and wikis have dominated the scene because of their appeal to the wider community and their ability to disseminate knowledge. However, blogs are time indexed, set up by an individual, and tend to focus on the current topic. Comments and entries are usually made by one participant at a time. Holding a senior position as Head of Knowledge Management in the BBC, Semple introduced blogs and wikis into that previously conservative organisation to make the most of this wired-up world of work, and thereby learnt how businesses can prepare themselves for the challenges and the opportunities they represent. While he describes the obvious popularity of the General Manager’s daily blog, it is the adoption of wikis for corporate knowledge management that is particularly compelling.
Hart and Warne (2006), among others, argue that it is difficult to get different parties to share organisational data, information and knowledge. These authors propose that those who are reluctant or refuse to share data, information or knowledge with each other, can generally be identified with different sub-cultures within the organisation. Different value sets, beliefs, assumptions, norms of behaviour and so on, could be a source of power struggles, conflict and political activity concerning not only data, information and knowledge sharing but also in other areas of organisational activity. The culturally oriented view suggests that a lack of sharing of organisational data, information and knowledge is a behaviour that can be changed. People who are refusing to share can be encouraged or educated to see the benefits of sharing or the organisational culture changed. In contrast, the politically oriented view argues that sharing takes place only with those who want to share. Encouraging, educating or coercing sharing will not be successful, and can even be detrimental.
Traditionally, the channels of information have been controlled by those who have wealth or influence. The creation of the Internet has had a democratising effect on the availability and use of information. Many users who are active on the Internet are there because they are attracted to the equal access it allows, and its break from traditional media. Affordable e-commerce has provided an opportunity for individuals and small businesses to compete in the global market place, often more successfully than cumbersome multi-national companies. Democracy raises public awareness of issues such as openness, freedom of information and public accountability (Benkler, 2006).
The same democratising effect will be true of conversational technologies. A wiki represents the power of many and this power is distributed collectively to improve content quality. Each author is able to change the contributions of other authors, refining the quality of the knowledge asset.
A wiki can be a type of ‘information commons’ that is a common space where people can share experiences and have unanticipated, un-chosen exposures to the ideas of others. Sunstein (2006) argues that the on-line effort of joining together people with diverse talents and interests to achieve common goals might well provide the best path to infotopia. However, in order for that to happen, people must feel they have more to gain from coming together than from being independent. Scardamalia (2003) adds that symmetric knowledge advancement occurs when the participants in a network are able to advance their own knowledge-building agendas by helping other participants advance theirs.
A wiki is a web-based application that allows many participants to write collaboratively, where they can continue to add to or edit the content of documents and dynamically determine the relationships between sets of documents. Such documents can be anything supported by the Web, with hyperlinks to anywhere on the World Wide Web including text documents, images and video. This type of application is named after the Hawaiian ‘wiki’, meaning ‘quick’, ‘fast’, or ‘to hasten’ and which is symbolic of the quick changes to content enabled by the editing processes that characterise it (Leuf and Cunningham, 2005). A wiki is, therefore, a collection of interlinked HTML web pages and has cross-links between internal pages where each page can not only be easily edited but also a complete record of such changes can be kept. In addition, any changed page can be easily reverted to any of its previous states. A wiki can be accessed from any web browser and no other special tools are needed to create and edit existing pages.
A wiki can be said to be an evolving knowledge repository where users are encouraged to make additions by adding new documents or working on existing ones (Pfaff and Hasan, 2006). The wiki takes advantage of the collaborative efforts of all members of the organisation to create an effective library of knowledge. An organisation that wants to survive and grow in the global competitive marketplace needs to familiarise itself with ‘organisational learning’ (Argyris and Schön, 1996; Friedman et al., 2005) and how successful an organisation is at being able to acquire and deploy knowledge will have an important impact on its competitive advantage.
Wiki sites have been created using several development tools and languages. The original wiki, developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994, was written in HyperPerl. Many clones have since been written in other languages such as Python, Java, Smalltalk, Active Server Pages, Ruby, PHP and Visual Basic. Blake (2001) states that the open platform makes it versatile to create clones to support corporate or departmental intranets. Many public sites, such as wikispaces,[1] offer an area on their wiki that is either free (to the public) or available for a small annual fee if it is for private use.
The best known example of a wiki is the popular English language version of Wikipedia,[2] which was started in 2001 and now has nearly 900,000 articles. Wikipedias have been published in 200 languages and contain a total of more than three million articles. Contributions come from all over the world. It is estimated that 100,000 people have made contributions, which does not include the four million who have done editing work on the contributed articles. In fact, more people have visited Wikipedia than other popular sites such as the online New York Times and CNN.
As their uses have become more apparent, countless numbers of wikis have been created, mostly independent of formal organisations. A wiki provides an ideal collaboration environment that offers users the capability to co-create and co-evolve a knowledge repository. It therefore also offers corporations the option to consider adopting the wiki as a growing and living resource for knowledge management. Central to the concept of a wiki is that a user does not need to have any technical (computing or Web-related) expertise to add, edit or delete a page. This means that even a novice user can contribute to the knowledge acquisition process in an organisation. A wiki allows sufficient flexibility for users to lend their own interpretation regarding a particular topic and it also avoids individual bias because the content is determined by all the users.
There are, however, social and legal issues that are militating against the easy uptake of wikis in corporations. If the wiki can legitimately be described as ‘social software’ (Swisher, 2004), then there are social factors that must undergo some changes before the wiki will be accepted as a way to improve an organisation’s knowledge management. The informal network approach that is currently favoured in a wiki may make some companies believe that their data quality will be affected and that system errors will occur. However, a centralised and highly structured environment will make it difficult to adopt a ‘community approach’ towards knowledge acquisition. Knowledge management priorities are linked to organisational structure and, as Santoro and Gopalakrishnan (2000) argue, knowledge management priorities are affected by environmental structures.
A wiki is open to vandalism, as has been demonstrated in at least one well-known case. The Los Angeles Times experimented with a wiki editorial and invited readers to collaborate online to add facts or update information. This ‘wikitorial’ only lasted three days because a few readers had posted obscene photographs on the site. The newspaper had to put the website out of commission because they could not prevent future disruptions (Shepard, 2005).
There is no recognition of authorship in a wiki because pages can be freely written or edited by anybody. This goes against the innate need by workers for recognition, as well as a common belief that the source of contributions should be accurately reflected. The wiki software uses the ‘contributors tag’ for general name recognition of ‘good’ authors or editors. However, this might lead to disputes among the contributors that they have not contributed ‘enough’ to the article to be considered as one of the authors or editors.
There are also concerns about the quality of content that contributors make. As stated in Wikipedia (2006), it is the official policy of Wikipedia to adopt a ‘neutral point of view’ (NPOV) to prevent the infiltration of biased views by some authors. This is to appeal to the forbearance of the majority to be fair and conciliatory if there are conflicts in opinions. To maintain quality compliance standards, an organisation needs assurance that the information on a wiki is credible. There is a need to determine matters of responsibility and how to decide who is to be held accountable if the data is fraudulent. The principal dilemma of a wiki is that, while its anarchic nature is desirable for fostering open debate without censorship, it also raises questions about the quality of information available, which could inhibit its usefulness. Issues of quality control need to be thought through. However, an evaluation of knowledge quality is extremely difficult to achieve. Donabedian (1980) suggests that measures of process and structure can be used as indirect indicators of quality. For example, one must take into account the reliability of information, provision of context, qualification of authors, as well as the use or acceptance of this information by other employees.
Finally, there are legal concerns in the use of a wiki in a formal organisational setting. The ability to protect intellectual property is potentially undermined by the use of a wiki since it is difficult to determine the true source of authorship and because in general there will be many authors contributing to an item. Another example of legal concerns is demonstrated in the case of John Seigenthaler, a former assistant attorney general working under Bobby Kennedy, who was dismayed to find that a false Wikipedia entry listed him as having been briefly suspected of involvement in the assassinations of both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy (Seigenthaler, 2005). However, legal experts assert that Section 230 of the Federal Communications Act (CDA) 1996 made Wikipedia safe from legal liability for libel, regardless of how long an inaccurate article stays on the site. Wikipedia is a service provider, not a publisher, and that fact makes them immune from liability for libel (Terdiman, 2005).