Designing a Successful Collaborative Wiki: The Choice between Outcome Quality and Online Community Needs

Designing a collaborative platform that produces project outcomes of high quality and allows for wisdom of the crowds to come together in the achievement of a common goal can be a challenge. Literature often addresses the interplay between designing for online community needs and outcome/product quality as coexistence, where design implementations in one positively affect the other. However, Human-Computer Interaction research has shown that performance and satisfaction need not be dependent on each other. This paper performs a theoretical analysis of the literature on the topic and identifies design gaps for collaborative projects. Findings derived by this theoretical analysis challenge existing design perspectives by demonstrating that there is often a tradeoff between designing for online community needs and outcome quality for these projects. Claims were developed that lead to research questions identifying the most important elements and design considerations are provided along with potential future directions for advancing the understanding of this relationship.