Finding your way with CampusWiki: a location-aware wiki

Abstract

Wikis provide a simple and unique approach to collaborative authoring, allowing any member of the community to contribute new, or change existing information. However, Wikis are typically disconnected from the physical context of users who are utilizing or creating content, resulting in suboptimal support for geographic communities. In addition, geographic communities might find the highly skewed generation of content by a few individuals problematic. Here we present research into addressing these challenges through location-awareness and lightweight user content rating mechanisms. We describe one such location-aware Wiki, CampusWiki and initial results from a field study demonstrating the value of location-linked content and the rating approach. We conclude with a discussion of design implications.