Automatically Evaluating the Quality of Contents Created by Open Collaborative Knowledge Building - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 139

Figure 1. The original WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki in the world. Its appearance is not that fancy, but it
initiated a wiki revolution

in 2001.
Wiki provides a simple platform for accu-
mulating, sharing and structuring information
where community members can contribute freely.
Because of the appearance of Wiki, Collaborative
Knowledge Building becomes a popular practice
for many knowledge-based organizations to de-
liver documentation, to replace their FAQs, and to
offer help-pages to their members, especially for
the institutions and organizations who encourage
the constitution and maintenance of self-orga-
nizing social networks of users (Wasko & Faraj
2005, Lin et al 2006, Moore & Serva 2007), and
for the companies who have a customer-centric

philosophy (Wagner & Majchrzak 2007).
As a collaborative writing environment, the
power of a wiki rests on its essential character-
istic, i.e., there is no ultimate authority and no
final definite wiki page. There may be a general
direction or theme, but the actual content of a
wiki is molded and manifested by contribution
made by individual members and accumulated
through community collaboration. In other words,
any member of the community can affect its qual-
ity. While wiki becomes increasingly popular,
involving all kinds of content contributors, the
question of how to enhance or ensure its quality
also becomes more and more pressing (Lih 2004,