Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to be notified of what? Does the existing organizational structure need to
be mirrored in the wiki? How is currently achieved such communication? Is
email/phone/chatting used for this purpose?
Wiki wise, communication can be internal or external. Internal communication
is achieved within the wiki. At this respect, two mechanisms are considered:
“discussion pages” and “templates” . Discussion pages (a.k.a. “talk” pages in
MediaWiki ) can be used for discussion and communicating with other users.
In this way, discussions are kept aside from the content of the associated
page. Templates have also been identified as effective means to deliver fixed
messages (e.g., warnings, to-do reminders, etc). On the other hand, external
communication refers to the ability to notify wiki changes outside the wiki itself
(e.g., through RSS feeds any rss client can be used).
Organigram Setting. Companies tend to be organized somehow, what is
indicated with the distinct “roles” that the “employees” adopt in projects.
Restriction Setting. Unlike public-access wikis, corporate wikis normally limit
access to employees. Permissions are counterintuitive in a wiki setting where
openness is a hallmark. Indeed, MediaWiki natively supports a basic mechanism
where the scope of permissions is the whole wiki: you can either edit the whole set
of wiki pages or not (e.g., anonymous users cannot read pages). By default, wiki
pages can be freely operated. However, permission demands are more stringent
in a company setting. Indeed, a study on the use of wikis in the enterprise reports
that “power relationships and competition between stakeholders created a need
to read access in the ResearchWiki” [5]. For the time being, two permissions are
considered: “read” and “edit” . Additional permissions could be added in future
releases if feedback so advises 1 .
Presentation Setting. Most companies project a unified image in terms of
rendering and presentation. Wikis resort to “skins” 2 for rendering. These skins
are engine specific. However, we do not expect our target audience to know
about skins. We should strive to capture presentation concerns in abstract terms,
better said, through domain criteria that could later be used by the DSL engine
to determine the most appropriate skin. Specifically, we consider “wikiSize”
and “wikiEditFreq” . Based on the expected size and edit frequency of the wiki,
heuristics can make an educated guess about the wiki skin. In this way, the DSL
engine frees stakeholders from being knowledgeable about presentation issues,
offering good-enough outputs. Notice that the wiki administrator can latter
change this automatically-selected skin. Additionally, the “logo” and “sidebar”
features are introduced for customizing both headers and index panes which are
available for speeding up wiki access.
1 MediaWiki permissions include “read”, “edit”, “createpage”, “createtalk”, “upload” ,
“delete”, “protect” (i.e., allows locking a page to prevent edits and moves), etc.
2 Askinis “a preset package containing graphical appearance details” , used to customise
the look and feel of wiki pages.
 
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