Hyperstructure Maintenance Costs in Large-scale Wikis

Wiki systems have developed over the past years as light- weight, community-editable, web-based hypertext systems. With the emergence of Semantic Wikis, these collections of interlinked documents have also gained a dual role as ad- hoc RDF (8) graphs. However, their roots lie at the limited hypertext capabilities of the World Wide Web (1): embedded links, without support for composite objects or transclusion. In this paper, we present experimental evidence that hy- perstructure changes, as opposed to content changes, form a substantial proportion of editing eort on a large-scale wiki. The experiment is set in the wider context of a study of how the technologies developed during decades of hyper- text research may be applied to improve management of wiki document structure and, with semantic wikis, knowl- edge structure.