The Impact of Shaping on Knowledge Reuse for Organizational Improvement with Wikis

An increasing number of published accounts (e.g., Cress and Kimmerle 2008; Kane and Fichman 2009; Wagner and Majchrzak 2007; Yates et al. 2010) describe Wikis and their impact on knowledge aggregation from many contributors. In this appendix, we extend these accounts to explain the specific mechanisms that cause Wiki-based efforts to succeed in the creation and maintenance of knowledge assets where others failed before. We explain how shaping facilitates the integration of contributions of many, and ultimately results in the reconstruction of expertise. Our argument first identifies four invariant challenges of expertise capture and reuse that tend to be experienced regardless of the technology support. These challenges are: (1) the bottleneck of expertise, (2) lack of incentives, (3) knowledge contextuality, and (4) the bottleneck of maintenance. Concluding that the traditional expertise model underlying the design of earlier knowledge management systems (KMS) cannot address these challenges, we explain how conversational knowledge management (e.g., via discussion forums) has tackled some of the challenges, yet leaves others unanswered. Our argument then turns to Wikis, which, as we illustrate, have the potential to address the remaining challenges, and in so doing point to a new mechanism to deconstruct and then reconstruct expertise. We explain several shaping behaviors and argue for the importance of shaping to maintain an integrated knowledge asset.