Building a University Information Technology Knowledge Base Using TiddlyWiki

Abstract

Keeping a knowledge base up to date can be a difficult and endless task for an Information Technology Services (ITS) department at a university. As technology emerges and is embraced by students and faculty, ITS can become responsible for supporting end users with all sorts of questions and problems. A knowledge base is a website or application used to store helpful information in the form of articles that can be easily shared with end users, giving them a way to support their technology problems without contacting a live person. When managing a large-scale knowledge base, information can be inadvertently replicated in many different areas and contradict other articles, especially when more than one manager can add or edit information. Information modules, or chunks of verified information that can be referenced and inserted into an article, can help eliminate contradictory information and ensure consistency with information that has to be in multiple places through the use of hypertextuality and transclusion. Hypertextuality is a way of organizing information and documents by creating individual bits of information that are assembled together to create a larger document, and transclusion is a way of assembling hypertext documents by simply referencing one into the other. TiddlyWiki is an application that is built around the idea of hypertextuality and transclusion. This project aims to explore the potential for a knowledge base to be built with the TiddlyWiki application.