Capturing Knowledge Triggering in Collaborative Settings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to observe and validate the phenomenon of knowledge triggering in collaborative environments, demonstrated on Wikipedia articles, with implications for designing better knowledge portals.

Contribution

It provides a mechanized approach to detect triggering in collaborative knowledge building, validated on Wikipedia, and offers insights for portal design enhancement.

Findings

Existing factoids lead to inclusion of more factoids in Wikipedia articles.

The method successfully detects triggering phenomena in real collaborative settings.

Insights can inform the design of portals to facilitate optimal triggering.

Abstract

In collaborative knowledge building settings, the existing knowledge in the system is perceived to set stage for the manifestation of more knowledge, termed as the phenomenon of triggering. Although the literature points to a few theories supporting the existence of this phenomenon, these have never been validated in real collaborative environments, thus questioning their general prevalence. In this work, we provide a mechanized way to observe the presence of triggering in knowledge building environments. We implement the method on the most-edited articles of Wikipedia and show how the existing factoids lead to the inclusion of more factoids in these articles. The proposed technique may further be used in other collaborative knowledge building settings as well. The insights obtained from the study will help the portal designers to build portals enabling optimal triggering.