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KM system to simplify or streamline work that is
already being done. For example, regular reports
can be entered directly into the system rather than
being sent to a manager for review.
and attracted users who were less comfortable
with such conventions, and more accustomed to
WYSIWYG word processing tools. As a result,
wikis began to support WYSIWYG editors,
although most still convert text into a different
markup format for storage, which presents other
problems. (Such editors were rare when wikis
were first developed, so perhaps the emphasis on
plain text was at least partly a rationalization of
technical limitations.) There is a clear trend toward
more complete (and complex) formatting options,
in the near future, this should be the default for
most major wiki platforms.
There are also tradeoffs between flexibility and
structure. Although ease of creating and editing
content is a great advantage, a wiki system can start
to resemble a used bookstore with an enormous
inventory but no way to locate specific items,
or even know if a particular item exists. Some
structure can help to avoid such problems, but too
much can discourage users. Similarly, although
most wikis encourage a flexible security model
where anyone can edit any content, in many cases
a more restricted model is necessary because of
organizational politics, legal requirements (such
as non-disclosure agreements), or other reasons.
Finally, there are tradeoffs between an em-
phasis on adding new content and an emphasis
on refining existing content. A system focused
on adding new content might emphasize features
to support threaded discussion, comments on
existing content, and attaching files. However,
searching through pages of discussion or attach-
ments in a variety of formats can be inefficient
and frustrating. In contrast, a system focused on
refining existing content might discourage such
features, and emphasize tagging, indexing, and
collaborative editing to produce fewer but more
reliable and more usable resources. However, this
emphasis also requires more effort on the part
of contributors. Of course, these tradeoffs also
depend on organization culture and incentives,
as discussed above.
tool & Platform tradeoffs
A second set of challenges involve tradeoffs in the
design of the wiki platform (or other KM tools)
and in the design of a particular KM system.
The KM system should be easy to use. Since
(as described above) most people use it rarely and
briefly, the system should not require experience
or training in order to start seeking or contributing
content. It should also be easy to add new content
or structures to the system. At the same time, a
smaller group of people contributes most of the
content and does most of the editing and organiz-
ing. These users expect (and may be more willing
to invest time learning) powerful tools to search,
format, categorize, and restructure content. Some
of these users will evolve gradually from the first
group, so the system should support and encour-
age a gradual transition between these groups.
Similarly, larger organizations need systems that
scale well to hundreds or thousands of users,
with different needs and in different locations; a
tool intended for small groups may have trouble
scaling to enterprise uses. For example, TWiki's
default search engine searches every page and
returns an alphabetical list of pages containing
given keywords. This may be sufficient for a small
system, but is inadequate for a system with thou-
sands of pages. Fortunately, TWiki has extensions
to create search indexes, and to weight results
by importance. Another example of this tradeoff
is the use of formatting in wikis. Initially, most
wikis supported only plain text, with a limited set
of formatting options using special conventions
(e.g. “*bold*” or “_underlined_”). This made it
simple to edit, search, and format content, and
many early wiki users were technical users who
were already familiar with using such conventions.
Over time, wikis added more formatting options,
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