Improving creation, maintenance and contribution in wikis with domain specific languages

Abstract

The radical simplicity and versatility of wikis have encouraged individuals and groups to rapidly embrace this technology. Wikis produce impressive results with minimal resources for knowledge formation and sharing. However, wikis¿ main characteristics have to be reconsidered when wikis are integrated in an existing organization as opposed to an open wiki (e.g., Wikipedia), due to the challenges this entails: (i) during wiki inception, wikis have to be tuned to the existing information ecosystem (e.g., documentation, organigram, milestones, etc.); (ii) wikis¿ organic growth results in huge structures of pages which constantly need manual restructuring and maintenance; and (iii) corporate users may demand a personal and protected setting before the exposition of their personal knowledge to the public scrutiny.This Thesis presents an approach, uses cases and a prototype to the aforementioned challenges: (i) it advocates the use of a ¿Wiki Scaffolding¿, i.e., a wiki installation that is provided at the onset to mimic the organizational setting; (ii) it facilitates ¿Wiki Refactoring¿ by mind maps manipulation; and (iii) it proposes a mechanism for wiki augmentation as a way for users to locally supplement their own content. The proposed approaches rely on Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to overcome the challenges, specifically WSL, WikiWhirl, WikiLayer and ScheMol.