Proliferation in Enterprise Wikis

Abstract

Wikis have become a popular tool for the collaborative creation of hyperlinked documents. Besides the well-known Wikipedia, enterprises are increasingly adopting wikis for internal documentation and knowledge management purposes. A typical attribute of wikis is their openness concerning the modification and creation of content and the lack of pre-defined structures. While this enables an easy access with low barriers for contributors, it also introduces certain problems – such as redundant or outdated content – which we subsume under the term of "wiki proliferation". In this paper, we analyze wiki proliferation in terms of its causes, consequences and common countermeasures. Our analysis is based on six qualitative interviews with companies which are using wikis internally. The interviews show that proliferation is a serious problem for these organizations which is actively addressed by different countermeasures.