A5BakerHoehlMeyers

A5BakerHoehlMeyers

To Do

• please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)

Task 1

Wikis fall into this category. Compare Wikis as meta-design environments with another meta-design environment of your choice for which user-generated content is the defining feature.

Task 2

Analyze in detail the following two Wikis:

• the Wiki used for our course with which you are (or at least should be) very familiar http://ngw.cs.colorado.edu/
• the Wiki for the research community in "Creativity and Information Technology" at: http://swiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/CreativeIT

Group response

1. Members of the Group

Chris Baker, Jeff Hoehl, Jane Meyers

2. Task 1

There are many meta design environments available online. We chose to analyze a fairly simple and commonplace example, web-based forums, because they are relatively easy to compare to wikis and differ in some interesting fundamental ways. Forums are generally set up using prebuilt forum software such as phpBB. This software provides tools to set up a customized forum community to suit your needs. For instance, for your community you may want to set up a hierarchy of discussion topics, enable avatar pictures, provide tools for users to flag posts as inappropriate, charge money to register, etc. For this reason forums can certainly be considered a meta design environment, as the software is designed to allow the end user, a forum owner, to design their own community. A further level of design occurs as individuals participate in the forum and help shape the nature of the community.

Like wikis, forums are a place of online discussion between many participating individuals. However, our broad characterization of the difference between wikis and forums is that of the community attitude. Wikis tend to have a tight-knit community in which active discussion results in a convergence towards the mean opinion of the group. The result of this discussion is a wiki page about some topic, which generally becomes more objective and accurate over time, especially with a large number of contributors. However, in forums the exact opposite occurs. Over time topics become more opinionated, diverge toward extreme opinions, and tend to deteriorate with a larger number of contributors. Below we have outlined some of some key differences between forums and wikis in the areas of system affordances and user behavior, all of which lead toward this general trend.

Issue	Wikis	Forums
Community Tendency	moderate; converges toward the mean	aggressive; diverges to extreme opinions
Community Cohesion	generally high due to common goal	varied
Topic Repetition	actively discouraged	frequent
Reaction to Unpopular Opinions	removal; generally ignored	encourage more contribution, usually extremely negative (see flame wars and trolling)
Topic Understandability Over Time	high; converges on most understandable representation	low; difficult to catch up on discussion as it lengthens
Newcomer Understanding of Topic	high	low; ignorance or argument repetition common due to not reading entire discussion
Moderation	tendency toward self moderation (extreme opinions edited, convergence toward the mean)	active moderation needed to maintain order
Ownership of Content	group; common artifact used by everybody	individual; personal views/opinions/expertise/etc expressed

Task 2

Issue	XWiki	CreativeIT Wiki
Aesthetics	Likes: The XWiki interface is more aesthetically pleasing with a more organized layout than the CreativeIT Wiki. Not only is this pleasant to look at, but it is easier to find and read navigation items and tools. For example, it is easy to distinguish the main body of content from navigational sections and tools, like the "Course Tools" and "Search" boxes. Overall this provides an open and welcoming feel to the site. Dislikes: Some aesthetic choices of the wiki are detrimental however. Clicking the titles of information boxes in the sidebars expands/collapses (not useful) rather than linking to useful content. Clicking "Recent Modifications" should take the users to an expanded and detailed change log rather than collapsing the box. The background also changes color between gray and blue without explanation causing confusion for the user.	Likes: The colorfulness of the wiki is extremely welcoming as is the interplay between text and graphics based navigation. This duality creates an atmosphere which is less "technical" and more visually interesting. Dislikes: Inconsistencies in the interface across pages: differences in page size, menu structure, and color, made it seem somewhat unprofessional.Additionally, due to line spacing it was difficult to tell whether some of the navigational options were one or two links. For example: Community Participants vs. Community Participants
Searching	Likes: A search box is available on every page to easily and quickly search for content regardless of where the user is on the site. The search results are well organized and provide useful details like the date and author of the last update to a page. Dislikes: The search results can be improved by provided snippets or previews of each page giving the user better feedback to page contents.	Dislikes: Unfortunately, to search the wiki one must click a search link which navigates away from the current page. Unlike the XWiki, searching options are fairly restricted to searching for variations in text capitalization and word versus phrase matching.
Sandbox	Likes: The sandbox is easy to find in the main navigation and allows users to test and learn editing and formatting techniques. This provides an inviting approach for editing since users are able to learn how to edit without affecting important or widely used portions of the site. Dislikes: However, the current configuration of the site uses a shared sandbox,which may inhibit the extent to which users play with the system. A private/individual sandbox would likely be a better configuration allowing users to test and modify content without the fear of embarrassment or public viewing. We recognize that this is technically available but not implemented as such.	Dislikes: Although the sandbox feature appears to be available from some users profiles, there is not an easily accessible link to this feature from the main navigation.
Privacy	Likes: New pages are public by default encouraging the sharing of content. Dislikes: Creating private pages is not simple and requires the editing of a large permissions matrix. It is difficult to determine what groups can see and edit pages on the site.	Likes: It was helpful that links to private wiki areas were indicated with a small "lock" symbol. This small but useful feature saves someone the trouble of practicing the "trial by error" testing method.
Monitoring Recent Activity	Likes: The "Current Week Activity" graph provides a quick and visual view of how things are changing on the site. This breaks up the text-only feel of the site and uses graphics for easier understanding and better aesthetic. Dislikes: It's hard to determine details about what has changed on the site. Although there is a list of the most recent six pages edited, it is generally not useful. The list should be more like the CreativeIT Wiki and provide a complete listing, separated by date, and include details such as who is editing and when. Seeing changes and knowing that there are active contributions entices you to contribute yourself.	Likes: The CreativeIT wiki provides users with several options for monitoring user activity, such as a list of the most recent modifications on the main page as well as providing access to site wide and page wide RSS feeds. In addition, a more extensive list of changes could be easily accessed from the main page. Dislikes: Unfortunately, it does not seem possible to view historical versions of modified pages. The modification links seem to only direct to the newest version of each page. Although the subscription to RSS feeds was available, we did not understand how to go about enlisting in the service.
Community of Users	Dislikes: It is difficult to get a feel for the community and users of the XWiki site. Although several "Last Members" are listed, their dates of membership and contributions are not easily accessible. It is difficult to get a view of the group and its interrelations as a whole.	Likes: The graphical web forming the links to users was a useful in not only creating an abstract representation of a community but also providing quick access to user profiles. Dislikes: Not only were names overlapping within the web but they were also seemingly unsorted, rendering them difficult to read and locate a name of interest. Additionally, the duplication of names in the left-hand panel seemed to be overly redundant.

Issue	Suggestions
Creating Meaningful and Dynamic Graphics	By incorporating visual feedback of user activity, recent "hot"discussion topics, or popular pages of interest, graphics could provide more meaningful information to active participants and curious bystandars. For example, we suggest that the names of participants in the CreativeIT web-graphic be changed to dots/photos, whose position on their line indicates their level of participation, shows their connections with other participants, or categorizes them by areas of interest.
Personalization	Although allowing participants to modify all wiki pages is important,so is the a user's portal into the wiki environment. It is silly to assume that all participants have the same motivations and interests,even within a small community wiki. We suggest that a further layer of meta-design be incorporated which allows interested participants the ability to design their own wiki portals, similar to the Google homepage, where users can personalize their perspective while having access to the same underlying content. This customization should come from being able to select from a component library but also allow users to create their own components for new data and content views.
Site Performance	Overall, both wikis' responsiveness are slow, thus discouraging casual browsing and limiting the amount of content users view. Furthermore, editing pages then viewing changes is very slow discouraging users from playing with the system or whimsically trying new formatting styles. This makes editing pages tedious and time-consuming and subtly encourages plain and simple designs.