WikiNavMap: a visualisation to supplement team-based wikis

Wikis are an invaluable tool for quickly and easily creating and editing a collection of web pages. Their use is particularly interesting in small teams to serve as a support for group communication, for co-ordination, as well as for creating collaborative document products. In spite of the very real appeal of the wiki for these purposes, there is a serious challenge due to their complexity. Team members can have difficulty identifying the structure and salient elements of the wiki. This paper describes the design of WikiNavMap, an alternative visual representation for wikis, which provides an overview of the wiki structure. Based on analysis of student wikis, we identified factors that help team members identify which wiki pages are currently relevant to them. We hypothesised that a structural overview coupled with the visual representations of these factors could assist users with wiki navigation decisions. We report a preliminary evaluation with a large group wiki, created over a full university semester by a group of ten users. The results are promising for a small wiki but point to challenges in coping with the complexity of a larger one.