What exactly is a wiki? According to Wikipedia, which is the largest public wiki available on the internet, a wiki is "a medium which can be edited by anyone with access to it, and provides an easy method for linking from one page to another". To me, this definition really downplays all of the great features of a wiki. They are easy to add to, and to edit. No complex computer language is needed to create or edit a page - there is little to no learning curve. Wikis are great for organizing information, knowledge; and can easily be scaled to the smallest or largest of size. Because of their open structure, they are great collaboration resource. The fact that the information posted can be reviewed and altered by others makes a wiki page the ultimate peer reviewed article.
While wiki's are great for the public, how can they be great to the intelligence community? Do you really want a giant wiki - essentially a massive database - of all the intelligence/information out there that can be viewed and edited? How can compartmentalization and classification be handled? While these are all valid concerns, the benefits that a wiki provides are truly invaluable. Some components of the intelligence community are already seeing the potential that a wiki provides. The CIA is one such agency, who has built an internal wiki - Intellipedia. I'll be taking a look at all these questions, along with Intellipedia and other wiki's in the IC in a later post.
There a number of options for someone who wants to start a wiki. You can host a wiki on your computer, or on a web server. You can also choose to have a company host a wiki for you - for most users, this is the best option. The wiki is already installed and configured for you, just waiting for content to be added. There are a number of companies out there that provide this service, but here are some of the best free sites out there:
Wikispaces is a simple looking website, but definitely don't judge this one by its cover. Wikispaces boasts a variety of features, including 2GB of storage, and unlimited users and pages. While this is more than sufficient for most users, they also offer paid packages for power users. One of the useful features available only in the paid plans are the privacy features. You can set your wiki to be public, viewable but only editable by certain people, and completely private - the wiki can only be accessed by a set group of people. Privacy features like this are crucial for wiki implementation in the IC.
Jotspot is claimed by many to be the best hosted wiki application available. They were recently purchased by Google, to incorporate their application into the Google Apps Suite, which includes Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and most recently Google Presentations. Unfortunately, as the transition is occuring, Jotspot is temporarily not accepting new user registrations, and I was unable to get into the site to take a closer look. I'll be sure to update this post when the transition is completed.
Stikipad was the most innovative wiki application I found. They are constantly adding new features, like Google Maps integration and the ability to add RSS feeds to your wiki. Stikipad, feature-wise anyways, is definitely the right choice for power users. Unfortunately, their free plan is a little lacking: they only offer you 30MB of space, and 500MB bandwidth monthly. They do offer moderately priced plans which greatly raise the storage limit, but these paid plans are almost necessary to use all the features available
PBwiki implies its ease of use right in its name. It's main feature is its usability - anybody can quickly create a wiki. PBwiki is more for personal and small group work. Files can be uploaded and shared, and PBwiki ensures the safety of your page by daily backups to three different servers.
Let me know about any wiki applications that you use. What feature do you find most helpful? What kind of features do you look for in a wiki? What are your thoughts about wikis in the Intellgence Community. I'll be taking a closer look at this topic a little later, but I would love to hear your thoughts.
- Chris
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3 comments:
By far the most common implementations use a locally hosted variant of MediaWiki on dedicated networks. A lot of effort has gone into that package, and the public Wikipedia is a great "training" sandbox that has already prepared a lot of potential users with basic skills and cultural protocols (such as the use of the talk pages and flagging images.)
One of the better hosted applications is SocialText, which incorporates both wiki like and blog like functionality in a gated environment. It offers a clean and professional interface with quite a lot of functionality.
There are also some very unusual variants of the wiki concept designed to edge application cases, such as TiddlyWiki - a one file wiki originally designed as a personal notebook version, but can also be used for (asynchronous) collaboration by simply dropping it on shared drive somewhere where the team all has access to it. (As long as multiple users don't attempt simultaneous edits.) This makes it of more limited value - but requires no IT support, something that is critical to making it work in selected institutions - and is fine for things like watch center rotations, etc.
You may also want to look into exploring the ways in which wiki like functionality is being bootstrapped into packages which traditionally have been built for other purposes, such as Sharepoint or Autonomy. Many agencies are already using these packages for other purposes - centralized file repositories and databasing - and the users are developing interesting ways of collaborating in the spaces whether the underlying technology envisioned it or not. These are fascinating potential case studies in what happens at the working line level in response to restrictions and mandates that force the standardization on tools that don't quite fit existing needs or new innovations.
I really liked the idea of adding a poll to your blogsite but you need to keep it open a bit longer if you can. More of us would like to have a chance to vote, I suspect.
There is a great comparison of wiki software on....you guessed it, Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
I'm a MediaWiki fan myself, and am current playing with the Semantic MediaWiki which has extensions for adding typical semantic relations between items on the pages (e.g., defining population figures on pages about cities so you can run queries such as 'how many cities has populations above 30,000'.
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Andrew J. Cowell (andrew@pnl.gov)
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