Information You Can Use in Business and Life

Why Wikipedia and Intellipedia (CIA's version of Wikipedia) can add Value for Information Users

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.

What does Wikipedia, Harvard, and Elsevier have in Common?

Recently (May, 2009) Irish student Shane Fitzgerald made up quotations, attributing them to French composer Maurice Jarre when he passed on and published the false quotes on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community removed the false quotations because they lacked citations that were accountable. Still many journalists from prominent newspapers included at least one of the false quotations in their obituaries for Jarre. Apparently, the journalists did not verify the quotes elsewhere.

As a result of this "test of Wikipedia", much has been made about how bad Wikipedia is as a source. To put it in perspective I would like to recall how the Harvard professor (Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary ) was paid as a consultant for 10 drug companies. Apparently the " the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects." Then there was the recent revelation that Elsevier published  "academic journals" for several years ( Elsevier Admits Error ) sponsored by Merck, the US pharmaceutical group, and presented the peer reviewed results as an independent academic journal.

This does not mean that all of Wikipedia, Harvard and Elsevier are bad as a source of information. What it does mean is that we need to do our own thinking and validate information from several sources, particularly if the information is important. If the information is wrong and published it makes the author and publisher look foolish. It seems like a logical conclusion that validation from several sources is needed when author credibility is on the line. Additionally, to assume everything/everyone in Wikipedia, Harvard and Elsevier are "bad" because of one inaccurate source, faculty member or journal is also not helpful relative to the totality of quality information in these three places. 

As information professionals, journalists and info users there can be multiple sources of information. One can get caught in a time trap and skip a few steps in the information gathering and analysis process if pressed for time.These recent revelations remind us to validate important information from any source be it a person or secondary source.

Another take on the Wikipedia Jarre issue is from the Xark 2.0 blog.

Lessons From Affaire-De-Jarre & Wikipedia

Guns and the Workplace, Schools Too!

The Kiplinger Letter Vol. 86, No. 19 ( May 8, 2009) in the Human Resources talks about banning guns at the workplace. Interested in banning guns, well you just might not be able to.

A bit of a background before I move into guns. I take spiders outside; can't stand the thought of killing them plus I am a whole lot bigger than the spider and don't think it is a fair fight. Also, I have not eaten meat in 20+ years and it is because I raised chickens when I live in Iowa. When I moved back to Colorado I "processed" the chickens and found out that action did not sit well with me. So I stopped eating meat. (I realize I am inconsistent with my philosophy as I eat fish and wear leather items, etc.)

That is the background for the next statement. I don't like guns and believe the vast majority of them are used to kill someone or something. I am aware of the Constitutional Amendment 2 - Right to Bear Arms, yet I still don't like guns in our daily life. When I read in The Kiplinger Letter that "more and more States are prohibiting employers from banning guns" in the workplace it chills me. If No One was allowed to have guns (the good and the bad "guys") in a workplace, then when tempers flared, mental eruptions occurred, etc., fist fights, knives perhaps, chairing throwing would occur. Not a spray of gun fire, potentially killing many. Certainly, there is no "game hunting" going on in the workplace and if No One  is allowed guns then a safer workplace is created for all workers. You have a better chance of defending yourself in a NO GUNS allowed environment than you do in an environment with guns.

When I think of a place that does ban guns, airplanes come to mind. If I consider the potential number of people who could be impacted by guns in the workplace, the numbers could be equal to or larger in the workplace than on an airplane. And I am very glad we ban them on airplanes. But why not workplaces and schools where the number of people are equal or greater than those on an airplane. One is federally regulated? Another perhaps State jurisdiction?  Yet, it is possible to ban guns in the workplace. Period. There is no purpose for guns in the workplace, not even the defending myself argument. If no one has guns in the workplace, there is no shooting and a whole lot of good employees to help out against the "bad"guys. 

I am not advocating no individual ownership of guns. I am not saying you don't have a right to hunt legally and own guns. (You can probably guess that I really don't like hunting. I put spiders outside and stopped eating meat because of the chickens I processed.) What I am advocating is banning guns in the workplace and in schools, in the environments where many people gather everyday.

Inhaling Dubious Facts. How Fast Do We Exhale?

I love this Title...The Dangers of Inhaling Dubious Facts.... Editorial, New Scientist, April 4 2009, page 3. The analogy for anything we read today exists.

New Scientist concludes...." but if claims like these can't be supported by sound science, the danger is that people will stop listening to the message."

My hope is if the message is not sound or of value, we are exhaling really fast, I hope.

The Dangers of Inhaling Dubious Facts

Close Bookstores, Lose Ideas?

On April 24, 2009 Lisa Scottoline, New York Times Best Selling Author, (Lisa Scottoline) visited the Tattered Cover bookstore  (Tattered Cover) as part of her book tour for Look Again. Lisa has a wonderful amount of energy and will share her ideas with the crowd on many topics during her tour.

Many folks know about the Tattered Cover bookstore as it has a stellar reputation far beyond Colorado. Lisa started the group with a discussion on the loss of bookstores (particularly independent bookstores). Lisa noted that one of the things she did not like about losing bookstores was that you "lose ideas." Without the benefit of an in-depth conversation with Lisa about her statement, I will plunge in with my thoughts about losing ideas.

Hmmm, I am not so sure about losing ideas when a bookstore closes. I think there are more places for ideas than ever before and people are using them in great numbers. Blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and have grown into places for people to provide ideas. In Technorati's State of Blogosphere 2008 ( State of Technorati Blogosphere 2008) they report 133 million blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002 and 7.4 million posted in the last 120 days (of the report).  People still have their social in-person visits with groups, friends and family with which to share ideas and people still have libraries.

IMHO there are a lot of places to share ideas and people are sharing them. I also believe there is still a love for ideas, books, and sharing and they won't go away even if independent bookstores do. Some of the things that have changed are the format and distribution for many things, including ideas. Much is now digital and electronic, that use to be in a physical format. Many things are distributed directly from the creator to the user, that use to include a middle person.   

There are many reasons to not close bookstores including the community it provides, a niche that chain bookstores don't provide, the desirable products and more.  I certainly hope we don't lose independent bookstores. Yet I do think ideas won't be lost. Now if there is a way a bookstore could figure out a concept of "keeping ideas" at the bookstore that could be a very interesting business model. 

Back to Lisa now. She is so much fun to hear in person and her books are great. Lisa gave another interesting thought when she spoke about her red dog moment and her daughter. If I have this correct her daughter is in college. When Lisa was doing the load the car up with her daughter's stuff, drive to and from college with daughter (with soooo many emotions) and a "red dog bleeding" all over the outside of the car (don't worry it was a stuffed animal), Lisa realized she had to hold on to this moment and that it is hard to let the kid go. Yet, it is easy she mused, because she doesn't really "own the kid." Can anyone ever "own' a person? This theme (per Lisa) is the core of her new book as well.

I have read all of Lisa's books but the lastest, Look Again, and am about to start on it. I recommend all of Lisa's books and independent book stores. Let the ideas flow.