Where are your Manners? Sharing Best Community Practices in the Web 2.0

TL;DR

This paper proposes a minimally intrusive framework for sharing best community practices in Web 2.0 platforms, especially wikis, through an annotation layer that offers behavioral hints rather than strict rules.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, rule-based annotation layer for Web 2.0 tools that promotes community best practices with minimal intrusion.

Findings

Framework effectively shares community practices

Supports integration with existing Web 2.0 tools

Provides behavioral hints without strict enforcement

Abstract

The Web 2.0 fosters the creation of communities by offering users a wide array of social software tools. While the success of these tools is based on their ability to support different interaction patterns among users by imposing as few limitations as possible, the communities they support are not free of rules (just think about the posting rules in a community forum or the editing rules in a thematic wiki). In this paper we propose a framework for the sharing of best community practices in the form of a (potentially rule-based) annotation layer that can be integrated with existing Web 2.0 community tools (with specific focus on wikis). This solution is characterized by minimal intrusiveness and plays nicely within the open spirit of the Web 2.0 by providing users with behavioral hints rather than by enforcing the strict adherence to a set of rules.