DekelPaper

Please exchange and collaborate here about the paper:

U. Dekel. A Framework for Studying the Use of Wikis in Knowledge Work Using Client-Side Access Data

(Old title was Gathering Client-Side Wiki Usage Data).

Abstract: While measurements of wiki usage typically focus on the active contribution of content, information on the passive use of existing content can be valuable for a range of commercial and research purposes. In particular, such data is necessary for reconstructing the context or tracing the flow of information in settings where wikis are used as collaboration platforms in knowledge work that relies on specialized tools, such as software development.

Meeting these needs requires detailed knowledge of user behavior, such as the duration for which a page was read and the sections visible at each point. This data cannot be collected by present wiki implementations and must be collected from the client-side, which presents a range of technical and privacy problems. In addition, this data must be correlated with traces of interaction with other tools.

In this paper we present an approach for solving these problems in which scripts embedded by the wiki server are executed by the client browser, and report on the user’s interaction with that document along with relevant structural information. These reports are relayed to a comprehensive framework for storing and accessing interaction and context data from the wiki and from additional tools used in knowledge work. This framework can be used to correlate these traces to obtain a complete view of the user’s work across tools, or to approximate his context at specific points in time.