Use of Wikis as An Engineering Collaborative Tool

This paper reports on the effectiveness of wikis for improving collaboration in engineering. Engineering has evolved from single-site design teams to non-collocated groups of experts with active involvement from every level of product stakeholder. Collaboration tools have been developed in order to accommodate these teams and integrate work on a single platform. Wikis are one such collaborative tool. Wikis are editable websites that allow users to add, delete and change any of the content that is on the site. For engineering collaboration, wikis can be tailored to facilitate a number of different roles like project management, knowledge dump and file storage. To examine the usefulness of wikis in engineering collaboration the authors analyzed the activity on a wiki that is part of a multi-university automotive research project. The project involves multi site, multidisciplinary collaboration on the design of an urban vehicle. By using the wiki, student participants are able to provide regular updates on the progress of their particular subsystems, allowing other team members to track changes that may affect their subsystems and take measures to adapt their design. From our observations the authors hope to determine how effective wikis are as a collaborative tool in engineering design and identify how the technology can be improved. By observing the wiki as it evolves through the design process, we can see if it retains its usefulness since each design stage brings new communication and collaborative needs. We will also compare wikis to conventional methods of collaborations and provide suggestions to improve wikis to make them more applicable to engineering collaboration.