Safety Measures for Social Computing in Wiki Learning Environment

Principles Of Social Computing

The focus of social computing is the possibility of designing digital systems that support the users by making their socially produced information available to all users. In order to enhance the functioning of a system, it uses the information that is produced by a group of people. Social computing should address certain issues as security, privacy, trust and risk to support a secure and trustworthy trading environment (Motahari et al., 2007). Social computing can be defined as any type of computing application in which software serves as an intermediary or a focus for a social relation (Schuler, 1994). It also refers to systems distributed across social collectivity which gather, process, represent, use, and disseminate the information. Moreover, the information is significantly precise since it is associated with people, who are linked to others. Also a social structure in which technology puts power in communities individuals and not institutions (Charron et al., 2006). Finally computational facilitation of human social dynamics and social studies as well as the design and use of ICTs that consider social context (Wang, 2005).

While wiki can be defined as Web-based software, it allows easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked pages by the site viewers via a web browser using a simplified markup language or What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) text editor. In fact, wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are mainly used to create collaborative wiki websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, organization intranets, and in knowledge management systems (Thite, 1999).