Biomedical Engineering Reference
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omnipresent collaboration tools often turn into little more than fancy
documents management systems. Knowledge remains hidden under piles
of reports and spreadsheets.
As a result, users tend to spend a large amount of their time on trivial
tasks such as fi nding a link to some team portal or looking up the meaning
of an acronym. A 2009 survey found it took an average of 38 minutes to
locate a document [1]. Overzealous search engines provide little relief:
how useful are 2000 hits on documents including a team's name when all
you are looking for is the home page of that team?
The majority of these tasks come down to questions such as 'where is
what', 'who knows what', and the ever popular 'if we only knew what we
knew'. In this context, the idea of an Enterprise Encyclopaedia becomes
particularly attractive.
16.2 Wiki-based Enterprise Encyclopaedia
The goal of an Enterprise Encyclopaedia is to capture the shared
knowledge from employees about a business: which entities are involved
(systems, hardware, software, people, or organisations) and how they
relate to one another (context).
Traditional knowledge management techniques have tried (and mostly
failed) to provide solutions to this problem for decades, particularly in
the collection, organisation and search of text and spreadsheet documents.
In recent years, wikis have emerged as a practical way to capture
knowledge collaboratively. However, they suffer from a reputation of
turning quickly into unstructured and little used repositories. They are
diffi cult to organise and even harder to maintain [2, 3].
The fi rst instinct for users is to collect whatever documents they
have into a digital library and rely on search to sort it out. To break
that perception, it is necessary to teach them to make the wiki their
document. This requires a lot of hand holding and training. Part of
that perception comes from the lack of quick and easy ways to get people
over the stage of importing what they know in the wiki. Wikis work
particularly well once they are in maintenance mode, when users just
add new pages or edit them when needed. They are more complicated
when users are faced with the task of fi rst uploading what they know into
blank pages. There is also a tendency to use Wikipedia as a benchmark.
'If Wikipedia can be successful, setting up our own wiki will make it
successful.' This approach overlooks Wikipedia's infrastructure and
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