Sustainable Knowledge in Hypertext

Abstract

Hypertextual in nature, the Web in its earliest form was technically limited and not capable of using the full richness of hypertext at that time. Despite subsequent advances in Web technology, some of the older hypertextual capabilities remain unrealised and hypertext/media appears to be treated more as a technology than a medium. For a hypertext docuverse that holds changing information, such as a knowledge base, paying heed to its hypertextual structure aids the long-term health and sustainability of the knowledge it contains. Wikipedia is the world largest public hypertext knowledge base. Constantly updated by humans and bots, it is an ever-changing knowledge store. Using Wikipedia as a context, this thesis investigates whether large collaborative hypertexts show signs of their contributors using deliberate hypertextual structure or are simply connecting ‘pages’ of digital content. The research also considers collaborative hypertexts in the context of social machines with regard to sustaining organisational knowledge as hypertext content. The results reveal under-use of processes available to sustain and improve an organisation’s docuverse and a gap in organisational roles and skill-sets to apply those processes.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mark Anderson: orcid.org/0000-0001-7396-0721

ORCID for Leslie Carr: orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

ORCID for David Millard: orcid.org/0000-0002-7512-2710

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