EFFICIENT COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT IN AN INDUSTRIAL
DESIGN ENGINEERING WIKI
Distributed Leadership
Regine W. Vroom, Adrie Kooijman and Raymond Jelierse
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Keywords: Industrial Design Engineering Wiki, Community Base of a Wiki, Trusting the Wiki Concept, Community
Management of a Wiki.
Abstract: Industrial design engineers use a wide variety of research fields when making decisions that will eventually
have significant impact on their designs. Obviously, designers cannot master every field, so they are
therefore often looking for a simple set of rules of thumb on a particular subject. For this reason a wiki has
been set up: www.wikid.eu. Whilst Wikipedia already offers a lot of this information, there is a distinct
difference between WikID and Wikipedia; Wikipedia aims to be an encyclopaedia, and therefore tries to be
as complete as possible. WikID aims to be a design tool. It offers information in a compact manner tailored
to its user group, being the Industrial Designers. The main subjects of this paper are the research on how to
create an efficient structure for the community of WikID and the creation of a tool for managing the
community. With the new functionality for managing group memberships and viewing information on
users, it will be easier to maintain the community. This will also help in creating a better community which
will be more inviting to participate in, provided that the assumptions made in this area hold true.
1 INTRODUCTION
Industrial design engineers are constantly searching
for information. Usually these designers turn to
technical literature or special websites provided by
developers or suppliers and more and more Wikipe
dia is used. When using books, they are often con-
fronted with a recurring problem: the information
found in technical literature (or many websites for
that matter) is often too detailed and sometimes out
dated. Industrial design engineers use a wide variety
of research fields when making decisions that will
eventually have significant impact on their designs.
Obviously, designers cannot master every field, so
they are therefore often looking for a simple set of
rules of thumb on a particular subject (Chowdhury,
2001), (Vroom et al., 2004). For this need C-DET
(acronym for Conceptual Design Engineering
Toolbox), an information database, has been set up
to accommodate the vast amount of information an
industrial design engineer might need, and aims to
do this in a way to help designers find information
more easily (Vroom, 2003). To enable quick navi-
gation an appropriate entrance structure in C-DET is
required. After several studies for determining the
knowledge structure for C-DET (Vroom et al., 2005
& 2006a), we decided to include at least the
following entrance categories to the database:
Design Process Phases for including: Design
theories, techniques and Design tools
Design aspects (such as Ergonomics,
Materials, Aesthetics, etc.),
Product domains (Children, Medical, etc.)
Besides these categories, C-DET includes a search
function using keywords (search engine). Three
prototypes for C-DET were built, tested and
evaluated. These evaluations have shown that a few
major issues remained. The main issue was the
labour consuming nature of collecting, selecting,
structuring and updating the knowledge for the
database. Several studies have been carried out
addressing a variety of solution directions for this
contents issue. Amongst these were the use of so-
called start-pages (Vroom et al., 2006b), and the use
of tools such as web robots, agents and spiders
(Legerstee et al., 2004).
In 2006 the decision was made to use wiki-
software for building and maintaining the database
so that the users themselves could select and
190
W. Vroom R., Kooijman A. and Jelierse R. (2009).
EFFICIENT COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT IN AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERING WIKI - Distributed Leadership.
In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Databases and Information Systems Integration, pages
190-195
DOI: 10.5220/0002006801900195
Copyright
c
SciTePress
maintain the contents of the design knowledge base
(Zinkstok et al., 2007). A prototype of C-DETwiki
has been built using MediaWiki software. After
evaluating and testing the prototype a number of
research questions arose including: 1) What is the
most convenient lay-out for the materials section 2)
Other wiki projects show that approximately 1 to 2
percent of the users contribute to the wiki (Usemod,
2007) and therefore a main issue is how to reach a
critical mass for the viability.
For studying these issues, we used a question
naire amongst 70 respondents. The results of this
questionnaire gave us a clear idea of the elements
that need to be implemented in a template. Further
more we found that our targeted user group is
willing to use a Wiki based Database, and has
limited fears of finding faulty information.
The results of these studies are implemented in
C-DETwiki. And because a wiki can only be a real
wiki when users are able to access and edit the
contents, the wiki is put online: www.wikid.eu. For
the online version the name WikID (a portmanteau
of wiki and industrial design) is used.
Figure 1: The main page of the industrial design
engineering wiki: WikID.
WikID is an Industrial Design Engineering Wiki that
aims to offer information in a compact manner,
especially targeted at industrial designers. Whilst
Wikipedia already offers a lot of this information,
there is a distinct difference between WikID and
Wikipedia; Wikipedia aims to be an encyclopaedia,
and therefore tries to be as complete as possible.
WikID aims to be a design tool. It offers information
in a compact manner tailored to its user group, being
the Industrial Designers.
2 PROBLEM AREA
When creating an industrial design engineering wiki,
certain problems arise; such as how to reach a large
enough user base or how to manage the community
once it has been established, although it will also
need managing during the process of establishing a
community. A problem indicated by the results of a
recent questionnaire states that people are somewhat
conservative in trusting information found on a wiki
(Jelierse et al., 2008), so it will be necessary to
establish a base of trust to the visitors of such a wiki,
in our case WikID, which is something that should
be looked into as well.
Also, since MediaWiki - the software used for
Wikipedia (amongst others) and WikID (after a
selective study) - is not by default equipped to easily
manage a user base, it will be necessary to create a
new tool for managing users and their rights. Along
with said tool, an efficient structure for defining
groups needs to be established. It is also necessary to
determine how the different rights within WikID
should be distributed amongst the groups.
Along the course of this paper, several
assumptions will be made, which will have to be
reviewed in a later stage. That, however, goes
beyond the scope of this paper.
The main subjects of this paper are the research
on how to create an efficient structure for the
community of WikID and the search for – or the
creation of – a tool for managing the community.
3 METHOD
For this research, a search has been conducted for
articles already published on this subject, and some
related areas. Most conclusions and assumptions will
be made in comparison to Wikipedia and its sister
projects within Wikimedia, since this family of
wikis is the most successful. Because of its success,
its policies and structures have been tested
extensively and a lot a research on that subject is
available. What also has a factor in the relevance of
the Wikimedia software is that WikID uses the same
wiki-software: MediaWiki.
Alongside the research on creating an efficient
structure for the WikID community, the options for a
tool for managing user rights were evaluated, by
searching for already existing extensions for
MediaWiki and investigating into creating custom
options, which will then be tested and evaluated by a
small group of users (known as the Pioneer Group
on WikID).
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4 USER RIGHTS IN WIKIPEDIA
All visitors of Wikipedia are considered to be
potential contributors to the encyclopaedia; therefore
the threshold to edit an article has been kept low.
Even anonymous users are able to edit articles, only
registering their IP-address as the author’s name.
Because everyone is able to edit articles, provided
they are not locked by the administrators, and some
subjects inhibit a certain amount of controversy,
people can become active in so-called edit wars
(Kittur et al., 2007). Mostly these edit wars are
simply resolved through discussion and mediation
from the community itself; should the dispute be
irresolvable by the community, it can be put through
arbitration with a special board appointed for such
cases. Their ruling is binding. (Kriplean et al., 2007)
Whereas all users can edit and reverse each
other’s edits, it may be necessary to remove multiple
edits by a user at once, or even block a user due to
multiple attempts of abuse. For this reason, a group
of administrators, known as sysops in default Media
Wiki installations, has been created. Among other
technical abilities, administrators can protect and
delete pages, block other editors, and undo these
actions as well (Wikipedia contributors, 2008).
Some rights can also be granted individually, such as
the right to rollback several edits by the same user
(rollbacker) or the right to view and remove
revisions of an article (oversight).
5 GROUP STRUCTURE IN
WIKIPEDIA
Figure 2: Schematic representation of hierarchy in
Wikimedia-projects.
During the years, as Wikipedia evolved and
spawned various sister-projects, the way rights were
granted has changed as well (Butler et al., 2008).
Currently a number of user levels exist within the
Wikimedia-projects: Stewards have the ability to
grant and also remove bureaucrat, oversight, check
user and several other rights to users after their
application has been approved. They also function as
bureaucrat within the Wikimedia-projects where no
bureaucrats have been appointed. Bureaucrats have
the ability to grant but not remove sysop-rights to
users that had their application approved. They can
also mark accounts as bots or rename accounts.
Administrators those that have been granted the
sysop-right are the users that moderate the workings
of the project that they were appointed on. They
should not be seen as different from regular users,
they merely have more technical abilities to maintain
a functional wiki (Wales, 2003). Next to these main
groups within the hierarchy, a few small groups
exist, which are used to grant only a single right to a
user. For example, the right to view all known IP-
addresses used by a certain user of Wikimedia.
These rights are bound to very strict policy and are
only granted after a thorough review by the
stewards. (Reagle et al., 2007), (Roth et al., 2007).
6 USER RIGHTS IN WikID
Whereas Wikipedia depends on the users to correct
almost all of the erroneous input by other users, it is
assumed that in WikID certain groups of users may
prefer to have extra rights in securing their
contributions, as some of them may have obligations
against the editing of their writings by users with
less experience with or knowledge about the subject.
This assumption was formulated after orientating
talks with a number of potential users of WikID,
who would like to use certain sections in the wiki to
refer to in their own tools, and stated their fear that
some relevant information might be deleted by edits
from others. Since we are looking towards having
contributors from the academic field, we want to
make sure that they find it worthy to invest their
time into writing and updating articles, something
that could be improved by offering this ability. This
should also help in getting the other visitors of
WikID to trust the content of an article; in a
questionnaire conducted for a previous research
subject, several respondents indicated that they were
afraid to find unreliable information in a wiki
(Jelierse et al., 2008). However, no matter how well
protected the wiki content may be, no guarantees can
ever be given on the correctness of any given article.
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7 WikID’S GROUP STRUCTURE
In WikID, the group structure will have some
similarity with the hierarchy of Wikipedia, but there
will also be some major differences.
Figure 3: Schematic representation of proposed hierarchy
in WikID.
7.1 Staff
The staff is the group that will incorporate some of
the functions of bureaucrats in Wikipedia, as well as
the stewards of the Wikimedia-projects. They will
guide the project, especially during the first period,
in which WikID will be growing. As WikID grows
on, it will become harder to control for the staff,
creating the need for a group of global moderators,
allowing the staff to operate more in the background.
In the beginning the staff will establish most of the
policies, which will later become something that will
be directed by the community as a whole; however,
the final saying over these matters lies by the staff.
When it comes to distributing rights, they will be the
only group with full authority over WikID, like the
stewards on Wikipedia.
7.2 Global Moderators
This group should be consisting of at least one
highly regarded member of each research area, and,
as WikID grows and the group needs to expand. The
global moderators are somewhat similar to the
administrators of Wikipedia in some ways. They
have the authority to intervene in serious disputes
and mediate between the parties in the dispute, but
they will also function as the arbitration committee.
Unlike the role of administrators in Wikipedia, the
global moderators should not be viewed as normal
users with more advanced technical abilities. They
are an authoritative group created to uphold the
policies as established by the community. They are
also involved in managing group memberships. It is
their task to monitor the members of the research
area groups and ascertain that they are acting
according to policy, not abusing their given rights. If
the situation requires it, they will be able to remove
misbehaving users from the specific research group.
7.3 Special Groups
These groups will serve a motivational measure in
WikID, appealing to users for the status that comes
along with membership to a group in this category.
Work on wikis is voluntary, and this is a way of
rewarding people that have put a lot of effort in
WikID. For example, before WikID was announced
to the public, a group of pioneers was established,
which would help fill the wiki with content. In order
to honour their contribution, a special group was
created for them, which, so it was assumed, would
motivate them to contribute. As WikID will
eventually grow, this would still be a way for the
members of the group to attain a special status
within the community, commemorating their
contributions to bring the wiki to where it is. Other
reasons for creating such a group may also come
along. Membership of these groups, however, does
not give the user extra rights in WikID, they
function merely as a reward.
7.4 Groups for Research Areas
Groups will be created based on industrial design
engineering specific areas, such as ergonomics,
mechanics and production. The members of these
groups should have a certain authority based on their
position within their area of research. In the first
stages of WikID, they will be appointed by the staff,
but eventually these groups will become self-
sustaining, with the ability for the members of the
group to grant membership to other users as well.
Members of these groups will have the role of
moderator within their respective area of expertise,
as they are considered experts in their field and will
therefore be able to correct erroneous content more
easily than a standard user. For this to function
correctly, they will receive the rights for protecting
pages and performing rollbacks. They will not be
able to remove users from their group, an option that
only staff and global moderators have.
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8 MANAGING USER RIGHTS
For efficiently managing the rights of all users in
WikID, an interface is required that is easy to use
and understand by an average user. It would also be
useful to directly view which users have registered
recently. The default tools supplied by MediaWiki,
Special:Listusers and Special:Userrights, do not
suffice. They are not user friendly and require too
much effort for doing something as simple as
changing the group membership of a user (see
Figure 4). Also, the default list of users in
MediaWiki does not show anything about when the
user has registered.
Figure 4: The interface for modifying group memberships
in MediaWiki 1.12.0 with Special:Userrights.
When looking through the extensions on the
MediaWiki-website, no existing solutions were
found to resolve the encountered problems with the
default situation. Therefore, it was decided to write a
custom extension for WikID. This new extension
should have at least the following features: 1) It
should have a more intuitive system for settings
group memberships. 2) It should present the
community as a list of users with multiple options
for sorting and filtering. 3) It should have the pos-
sibility of adding multiple users to a group at once.
Work was started on writing the extension, first
by browsing through the manual, the API-reference
and, later, the source of MediaWiki. During review
of the source, it was discovered that even the authors
of MediaWiki themselves were not particularly
happy with the current user rights page: @todo Use
checkboxes or something, this list thing is incompre-
hensible to normal human beings, (MediaWiki
Source, 2008)
The main entry point in the draft of the new
extension Special:Advanced-Userrights had become
a sortable list of users, with a pager for improved
manageability when having a large community.
Features already include more intuitive group
membership management (see Figure 5) and the
ability to view extra information about a user.
Also, to increase the usability of the extension, a
patch had been written for the Skin-Template-class,
adding a hook to the build-NavUrls-function,
allowing for the modification of the array containing
the navigation URLs. This was then used to add
extra toolbox items in the User-namespace to link to
the user information and group membership pages,
providing anyone with the necessary rights a direct
link to the newly created functionality of the
extension.
During the first few weeks the new tools have
been available to the WikID staff it has already
proven itself worthy in the process of building the
community. The new list interface provides the
ability to quickly see whether new users have
registered with WikID, allowing the staff to monitor
the growth of the community as well as checking the
validity of the newly created accounts.
Figure 5: Interface for modifying group membership in MediaWiki 1.12.0, Special:AdvancedUserrights.
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9 DISCUSSION
Several assumptions have been made during the
research on this subject, most of which have yet to
be tested. For example, misuse of the protect-right
could lead to stagnation in the use of WikID and
should be carefully monitored. Actions to be taken
accordingly can be either diminishing the amount of
users with access to the right or better instruction on
when to use it for the users that have the right.
Also, users should be made aware of the fact that
they can request groups for a certain research area, if
it does not yet exist. The process of joining an
existing group could also be more concrete.
During the writing of this paper, version 1.13.0
of MediaWiki was being developed. Upon reviewing
the changes to the software, it was discovered that
the user rights management system had been over
hauled (MediaWiki source, trunk, 2008), and that
the system as implemented by MediaWiki somewhat
resembles the system as implemented by the newly
written extension.
10 CONCLUSIONS
Through the creation of a clear hierarchical structure
for WikID, several issues concerning the quality of
the content as well as the ability to modify the
content will, at least partially, have been resolved.
With the new functionality for managing group
memberships and viewing information on users, it
will be easier to maintain the community. This will
help in creating a better community which will be
more inviting to participate in, provided that the
assumptions made in this area hold true.
For the correct functioning of the system, several
policies on the usage of certain rights will have to be
drafted. For examples on what they might look like,
Wikipedia can serve as an interesting example, as
their policies seem to work quite well.
Also of importance to the correct functioning of
the system is the way users with extended rights
behave towards each other and regular users.
Especially in the early stages of WikID it will be of
utmost importance that every event of abuse will
result in action taken by the staff.
The functionality of the created extension can
also be expanded further; several demands have not
yet been met. Conjoined with the work on this, it
will also be interesting to see how MediaWiki can be
extended to have moderators that can only operate
on certain sections of WikID instead of the current
situation where every moderator is allowed to
exercise their rights site-wide.
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