Design Alternatives for a MediaWiki to Support Collaborative Writing

Web 2.0 technologies are having a considerable influence on the learning industry. Constructivist learning processes, such as collaborative writing, have emerged as a result of the development of Web 2.0 technologies. We define the term “mandatory collaborative writing” to describe a writing task where the group has a firm deadline. This article focuses on how a wiki can fully support mandatory group writing. The motivation of this design science research study emerges from a graduate Knowledge Management class assignment to write a wiki book. The main finding shows that the wiki instance used for the project, MediaWiki, could better facilitate the collaborative writing process with a set of extensions that support discussion and project management. We outline designs for these processes: 1) a discussion process that changes the way users discuss content on a wiki page and increases group awareness; and 2) a project management process that increases awareness of the status of each component of the writing project and provides an overall summary of the project. A demonstration of the principles to a focus group provided a basic proof of the validity of this design. The significant contributions of this study are these processes, which can facilitate group writing and constructivist learning processes. Contributions of the study to several streams of research are discussed.