Simone Braun
Andreas Schmidt
Wikis as a Technology
Fostering Knowledge Maturing:
What we can learn from Wikipedia
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies
Dept. Information Process Engineering
Karlsruhe, GERMANY
{braun|aschmidt}@fzi.de
http://www.fzi.de/ipe
© FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 1

Outline
Overview of Knowledge Maturing theory
Goals of study
Qualitative study
Quantitative study
Transferability to enterprise context
Conclusions
FZI Research for Information Technologies | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 2

Motivation
New paradigm of work-integrated learning
• learning and working are interwoven
• beyond one-way training
• learning is an active and creative process
The Knowledge Maturing theory
views individual learning processes as interlinked
• at the heart: co-creation of artefacts
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Knowledge Maturing Process
Criteria (from Maier & Schmidt 2007)
• teachability
• legitimation & commitment
• explicit linkage/implicit contextualization
• hardness
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One Vision: Maturity Awareness
Workplace learning
support by
recommending learning
opportunities in the
form of microcontent
Appropriateness can be
decided based on
competencies and
maturity level
from: Schmidt (2007): Microlearning and the knowledge
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maturing process, Microlearning 2007

The Study
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Goals of our study
Knowledge Maturing theory so far is based only on anecdotal evidence
Why Wikipedia
• largest social experiment related to knowledge maturing
where we have all the data (artefacts, history)
Hypotheses qualitative study
• knowledge maturing actually takes place in wikis
(including criteria from Maier & Schmidt 2007 make sense)
• socio-technical wiki systems have brought forth instruments overcoming
barriers in the maturing processes
Hypotheses quantitative study
• criteria like teachability, and explicit linkage increase along the maturing
process
• maturity of articles can be measured in an automated way
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Qualitative Study (1)
Artefact Layer (= wiki pages)
• predicates representing the legitimation by the Wikipedia community
o good article (“lesenswert”), featured article (“exzellente Artikel”), but also
“stub” and “needs review”
• definitions for the level of quality
• candidate lists implementing a limited and very loose form of transition
workflow
o also encouraging maturing
Knowledge Layer
• use of categories to organize articles
• links among articles that are not directly tied to the occurrence of the
article name
• disambiguation pages.
=> contribute to improving the decontextualization process
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Qualitative Study (2)
Social Layer
• “Wikiquette”
• discussion pages
• changes are visible in a global as well as in a local change log
• user identity, watchlists
• limit of activities by technical means (edit wars, write-protected
articles)
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Quantitative Study
Basis:
German Wikipedia, full XML dump with history (Jan 24, 2007)
Operationalization of criteria
• teachability: readability score, structuredness (words per headline etc.), images
• linkage: (unique) link count, (unique) link per words
Two types of study
• snapshot study:
o all articles at a certain point in time
o significant differences among different maturity levels
• longitudinal study
o article history over their lifetime, estricted to featured and excellent articles
o developments of criteria over time
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Snapshot study
Stub Normal Good Featured
19852 28763 612 343
#articles
43 (4) 60 1196 (753) 5386 (4580) 6689 (5952) 3561
#words p. article
1359 3428
35 (41) 32 50 (53) 35 55 (55) 7 54 (54) 6
readability p.
article
0 (0) 1 7 (5) 8 21 (18) 13 24 (22) 14
#headlines p. art.
0 (0) 0 2 (0) 6 8 (6) 10 11 (8) 13
#images p.
article
105 (96) 50 198 (157) 198 391 (229) 880 438 (249) 883
#words p.
headline
132 (138) 747 (493) 827 1289 (722) 1897 1181 (647) 1633
#words p. image
45
6 (1) 9 75 (55) 71 212 (170) 144 240 (213) 137 272
#(unique)
6 (1) 9 82 (58) 87 238 (188) 171 (233) 169
internal links
5 (3) 5 16 (13) 17 29 (21) 25 31 (24) 26
#words p. int.
link
link density (%) 31 (33) 16 9 (8) 4 5 (5) 2 4 (4) 2
(mean (median) σ)
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Longitudinal Study (1)
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Longitudinal Study (2)
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Longitudinal Study (3)
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Transferability and Conclusions
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Wikipedia vs. Enterprise Wikis
Wikipedia Enterprise wikis
Size of large numbers limited to (parts of) the organization
community
Goal general public persistence and exchange of
encyclopaedia experiences
Type of rather mature knowledge immature knowledge (mostly
(at least ad-hoc training) distribution in communities and
knowledge
formalization, up to ad-hoc-training)
Maturing artefact level (knowledge knowledge level (artefacts are
is considered to be considered to be facilitating the
focus
sufficiently mature) collaboration and exchange)
Motivation idealism and work process needs, professional
identification with esteem, organizational goals
Wikipedia goals, quest
for social esteem
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Conclusions
Knowledge maturing theory confirmed by qualitative and
quantitative study
• several instruments at artefact, knowledge and social level identified
Quantitative study confirmed criteria on average
• but: high standard deviation
=> no automated computation of maturity
Limited transferability to enterprise wikis
• but problem of automation becomes even harder (less homogeneous)
• additional problem: maturing on knowledge layer
Future steps:
• explore additional information like creation/usage context
• large-scale empirical study (together with University of Innsbruck) in
enterprise context
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Contact
Upcoming FP7 Integrating Project:
http://www.im-wissensnetz.de
Andreas Schmidt
Department Manager
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies
Information Process Engineering
http://mature-ip.eu
Andreas.Schmidt@fzi.de
http://andreas.schmidt.name
FZI Research for Information Technologies | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 18