Rooms, spaces, or folders for containment?

Over the past 6 months, students of the Technology Innovation Management master’s program at Carleton University have been using a wiki-based knowledge creation environment based on TikiWiki.

The system features rooms, analogous to categories (in standard TikiWiki), spaces or folders in other products, and we got quite interesting feedback on our implementation of online knowledge spaces as rooms. At first, a number of users found the rooms terminology somewhat unfamiliar, but as they continued using it, became increasingly comfortable with the idea.

The use of the term rooms instead of folders is deliberate, in order to discourage folder proliferation. The aim is to avoid the situation where there are too many folders making subsequent search for information difficult. The term rooms also predisposes users to use them as containments for projects and user groups such as TIM 5001 class but not types of activities, e.g. Assignments. For smaller containment, users could create multi-page documents, analogous to wikibooks but chained together in a more unified underlying structure.

We found that hierarchical rooms confused users as the concept of a sub-room is difficult to visualize. As users do not use more than three levels of containment anyway, the correct analogy should be rooms for top level containment, folders for second level containment, and multi-page documents for third level containment. The term multi-page document is a mouthful and we are still looking for something more succinct to describe this. I don’t like the term book because that implies a large number of pages, and document by itself to most people refers to something more like a Word document, which tends to be attached to pages in the wiki.

Users who have had experience with online virtual worlds (3D or otherwise) are extremely excited about the term rooms, though others much less so. Nonetheless, the idea of a room does provide context to guide social interaction, providing cues as to what is acceptable behavior. It also provides a natural analogy for access control and ownership. In this sense, the term room may even be better than the rather generic term space. However, it is noted that while space suggests openness, room implies some degree of exclusion. Further research will have to be done on how best to combine elements of both open spaces and closed rooms as top level containment structures in online environments, and the terminology to be used.