The Life Cycle of Corporate Wikis: an Analysis of Activity Patterns

Following the success of wikis on the internet (e.g. Wikipedia), corporations have begun adopting wikis. Preliminary evidence suggests that wiki is a sustainable collaboration tool and that wikis deployment is experiencing massive success. The objective of this paper is to provide a large scale evaluation of corporate wikis life cycles. We analyze and categorize the temporal activity patterns of more than thirteen thousand wikis in one multinational organization over a 29 months period. This clustering problem poses some unique challenges, and required the development of novel extensions to existing algorithms. We identified four clusters and their prototypical activity patterns. Our findings show that, contrary to what has been suggested in previous studies, most corporate wikis become inactive after a relatively short period, and less than 20% of wikis show continuous activity. Implications for research and practice are discussed.