Negotiating access within Wiki

Abstract

A wiki hypertext is typically accessible and editable by all. While this removes impediments to collaboration, it often deters participants who would rather incubate ideas before bringing them to the group. This is especially the case where creative ideas are at stake. Creating additional wikis with restricted access is a costly solution: it requires participants to distinguish between and navigate between wikis; it requires administrators to construct wikis and their access rules; and it does not account for the movement of content from private to public. In this paper, we describe a system that augments the hypertext in order to solve these problems. This system automatically creates and maintains access rules in response to browsing and editing of the wiki hypertext. In doing so, it improves the targeting of documents in the hypertext, and identifies significant collections of documents and participants.