The changing knowledge role of wikis

A wiki¹ is a form of internet or intranet publication which is collaboratively and directly edited and managed by its audience. This is typically done through a web browser for public wikis, or through intranet interfaces for wikis that are internal to an organization and part of its knowledge base. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can be edited, and each page includes hyperlinks to other pages or external information. A very well-known example of a wiki is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Wikis are one of the “Web 2.0” tools² which in the early 2000s saw the internet move from  being just an information source to becoming collaborative and interactive technology that could support knowledge management (KM)³. Other Web 2.0 tools include blogs, social media, and social bookmarking.

What has happened with wikis in KM since the early 2000s?

A newly published paper⁴ in the journal Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems explores this question through a bibliometric analysis of 352 research documents on the use of wikis in business contexts. The documents are indexed in the academic research database Scopus⁵, and published between 2003 and 2025. Paper authors Hrvoje Budić, Igor Klopotan, and Ivan Hegeduš used VOSviewer to map the results of their analysis.

Bibliometric analysis⁶ is a research approach in which statistical methods are used to determine the quantitative features of other research, for example by looking at how often particular keywords occur in research papers and together with what other keywords, and how this changes over time.

The analysis reveals that the topic gained attention in the mid-2000s, with a notable increase in interest after 2006. The peak period was between 2008 and 2010, when more than 30 papers per year were published, reflecting the popularity of wikis as collaborative tools in business practice and research. After 2011, the number of studies fluctuated, with a minor increase from 2014 to 2016, followed by a decline. Since 2020, the number of publications has dropped to single digits.

Budić and colleagues contend that the decrease can be attributed to the shift in attention to social media platforms and integrated collaboration tools, which have assumed much of the original role of wikis in business contexts. However, they find that at the same time, recent publications increasingly mention wikis in connection with AI training, knowledge graphs, and natural language processing. This suggests that while their direct business relevance has diminished, wikis continue to serve as valuable infrastructures for emerging digital technologies.

The network visualisation in Figure 1 groups keywords from the analysis into thematic clusters, each represented by a different colour. Key clusters include knowledge management and collaboration, education and e-learning, innovation and information management, and social networking and web technologies. The structure suggests that research on wikis in business has been highly interdisciplinary, linking organisational studies with computer science and education. The central position of wiki and knowledge management shows their importance in bridging concepts across clusters.

The overlay map in Figure 2 highlights the evolution of research themes over time. Earlier studies (shown in darker blue) focused on Web 2.0, information systems, and knowledge management. More recent topics (yellow-green) include learning systems, deep learning, natural language processing, and knowledge graphs.

Figure 3 presents the results of the topic analysis of keywords that occur in papers only from 2020 to 2025. This further confirms that wikis are no longer central to research relating to KM in business, but instead appear in connection with artificial intelligence themes, such as deep learning, language models, knowledge graphs, and natural language processing.

This indicates a clear shift: while wikis were studied as tools for collaboration and knowledge management in organisations in earlier years, they are now more often referenced in the context of AI training datasets and generative AI applications.  Their continued use in AI research means that wikis are undergoing an important transformation – from being a collaborative platform for organisations to becoming a knowledge resource for machine learning and generative AI systems.

Article source: Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems, CC BY 4.0.

Header image source: Teconología on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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