“A new Wiki way?” - An experimental study of collaborative knowledge building scripts

Abstract

One of Wikipedia’s main guiding principles reads as follows: Be Bold. From Wikipedia’s early days on users were encouraged to share their knowledge at any convenient time without major restrictions by either adding new content or editing the encyclopedia’s existing content in the sense of knowledge building in collaborative writing systems. In order to ensure that authors and editors of articles successfully collaborate on shared knowledge artifacts, rules and guidelines have been implemented into the community closely related to the Be Bold principle. One of these guidelines is the so-called Bold, Revert, Discuss (BRD) Cycle that describes a workflow corresponding to a collaboration script on how individuals in an environment like Wikipedia should interact with each other to jointly create and manage articles. This cycle was primarily implemented to attract masses of new authors and editors to the community by lowering the bar for participation. From today’s point of view it is debatable if this procedure should be further promoted or if alternative methods as the in this study proposed script Talk, Consensus, Revise (TCR) prove themselves as more effective for knowledge building with a special focus on socio-cognitive conflicts in Wikis. We expect that students collaboratively working together using the TCR alternative script will produce qualitatively higher articles and will perform better in a knowledge test about the study’s topic.