The CIA has Intellipedia,"the Intelligence Community’s version of Wikipedia" (Wikipedia on Intellipedia).
Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, two CIA officers who were behind the Intellipedia effort, write about the reasons why open, collaborative, user driven content, in a format that is easily and quickly available for information creation, edits and corrections, is valuable.
"The inspiration for Intellipedia came from a 2004 award-winning paper by CIA employee Calvin Andrus entitled, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” "The paper detailed the need for the IC to adapt to the increased pace of the world."
Intellipedia is in its third year and in the CIA's own words,"The reason Intellipedia has achieved such success thus far is because of its grassroots initiatives.“Up until now, Intellipedia has been a quiet revolution,” Dennehy said. “At the grassroots level, Intellipedia users have added more and more edits, which adds value. All of this churns and churns in the background until it becomes something that is really valuable. I think that’s where we are now.”
Prion to Intellipedia the analytical report was the primary method for combining information and intelligence. The scope of contributions was limited, with possible loss of key information to make an intelligence decision. The CIA has found that "more than analysis is needed in today’s Intelligence Community."
“In addition to analysis, we need people who can create an ecosystem of knowledge that is not specifically about answering tomorrow’s questions, but creating a world of information that is connected,” Burke said.
“There’s too much emphasis on the analytical report,” Dennehy said. “It’s important to look at how we get to the finished intelligence. Intellipedia does this by making the process more social and creating a dialogue that’s transparent.” "Intellipedia has had a remarkable three years. Growing from a grassroots initiative to more than 15,000 edits in a single day, Intellipedia is one of the first places the Intelligence Community goes for information. It’s exciting to imagine the possibilities that Intellipedia’s fourth year might bring."
Wikipedia critics who categorically dismiss it as a potential source of information, are missing out on potentially rich content in certain subject matters. In year three, the CIA a hot bed of secrecy, is finding value and ways to manage their wiki and create value. IMHO so has Wikipedia.
I really like how the CIA talks about the value of collaboration on a wiki, "All of this churns and churns in the background until it becomes something that is really valuable." Surely there is a whole lot of valuable churning going on in Wikipedia and other Wikis that can be used as one source of many, when validating topics.
Intellipdeia is not open to the public and you can gain more insight on it in Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Intellipedia. I do wonder what the world might look like if Intellipedia were up and running ("churning and churning") when the intelligence around weapons of mass destruction (WMD) failed to deliver accurate knowledge.