‘Wikimaniacs’ debate corporate acceptance of wikis

It’s a wiki, wiki world, whether you know it yet, or not. Such was the vibe at Wikimania 2006, the second-annual conference on all things Wikipedia — the online, free (and sometimes controversial) encyclopedia. The event drew an estimated 400-plus attendee from 50 countries s to the Harvard Law School, where the conference ran from Friday to Sunday.

News out of the conference varied as widely as Wikipedia’s interests: the launch of a project to put Wikipedia on the One Laptop per Child’s $100 computer; the unveiling of Wikiwyg, a WYSIWYG text editing software; the introduction of plans for a “Wikiversity;” and an initiative to “turn attention away from growth and towards [the] quality” of information in the 1.2 million articles on Wikipedia.org, which was announced by Jimmy Wales, the project’s founder.

Among the myriad ideas bouncing around the conference was the emergence of wiki technology behind corporate firewalls as a knowledge management tool. One thriving example of this is going on at Intel, which runs Intelpedia — an online, freely editable encyclopedia of terms and concepts specific to Intel employees (and accessible only on the company’s intranet).

The site is run by Josh Bancroft, a systems developer, technology evangelist, and self-described “geek blogger” for the chip maker, who discussed his work at Wikimania on Sunday.

“There are all sorts of silos of people at Intel, who needed to share information and need a good tool to do it,” Bancroft said. MediaWiki — the open-source application package that runs Wikipedia.org — emerged as being fit for the job.

The site has two rules, Bancroft said. First, entries must not violate corporate policies. (In other world “don’t post the recipe to secret sauce,” or any other information that you wouldn’t want the entire company to see). The second rule: entries must be useful to at least one other person.

While the site uses the same software and format as Wikipedia.org, Intelpedia looks at the world as it pertains to the company. For example, a Wikipedia entry on Helium might give basic facts on the properties and uses of the gas. Intelpedia would discuss how the element is used in the various processes of chip fabrication, or other manufacturing activities, for example.

According to Bancroft, Intelpedia came about from a post on an internal Intel blog by John G. Miner, a senior Intel product support engineer, stating: “Wouldn’t it be cool to have something like Wikipedia inside of Intel?”

Initial reaction to the post was pessimistic, Bancroft said. A long project approval process and internal resistance was expected for such an undertaking. So Bancroft downloaded MediaWiki — the open-source application package that runs Wikipedia.org, and other internal wiki sites — and put the site up himself. As the tool caught on, Intelpedia entries began flowing in, and support for it grew among Intel employees.

“Intel is a very closed company,” Bancroft said, jokingly referring to Only the Paranoid Survive, the title of Intel co-founder Andrew Grove’s book. “That’s just kind of the mentality,” he said. “[Intelpedia] is the beginning of what I hope is a cultural shift at Intel.”

Getting a behind-the-firewall wiki off the ground, and pushing back ingrained possessive attitudes about corporate data and knowledge, was the goal of another Wikimania attendee.

“The natural desires of corporations are to put things in boxes and lock [different departments] out,” said Erik Zachte, a software developer and consultant for KLM Dutch Airlines, which is “taking our first steps to introduce a wiki.”

He said overcoming traditionally closed corporate practices on information sharing could be an eye- and mind-opening exercise for the company — hopefully with improved productivity and bottom-line results to come soon.

“There is so much information stored in lockers, and in the backs of people’s heads,” said Zachte, “I think many people spend a part of every day just figuring out where they can get some information.” He said the airline’s IT department will likely be the first place a wiki would be tested and deployed.

Besides corporate ideas on information control, nature of wikis and the MediWiki software — to permit universal access and changes to information — also runs runs counter to culture and practices of IT and security, according to other “Wikimanics” at the show.

“MediaWiki is not known for its robust access control tools,” said Rob Lanphier, an independent software developer, and former programmer with RealNetworks, who develops and maintains MediaWiki code. Questions from enterprises users Lanphier often hears involve how to deploy MediaWiki so that only certain groups can read or access content.

While the software has strong features for controlling who can edit and access entries — as any locked-out user on Wikipedia.org’s blacklist would know — “limiting read-access is the part that requires a big re-think of the code.”

It is difficult to limit what various end-users can see on a single MediaWiki server instance, Lanphier said, since the software was not designed to allow for varying levels of content access based on groups of end users. Setting up separate MediaWiki servers, and using access controls included with Apache Web server for each server, are the best ways to segment who can see what on an internal wiki with MediaWiki, Lanphier said.

Apart from access control, it’s the open and easy access of wiki technology that users should focus on, Lanphier said.

“There are all these content management systems, with these fantastically complicated access control mechanisms,” he said. “A lot of those access controls get in the way of communications inside a company … [and] eventually, everyone goes back to mailing [Microsoft] Word documents to one another.”

Besides access control, MediaWiki users discussed other tools and technologies they’re looking into to increase wiki participation internally, or for policing content on larger external-facing wiki sites.

“We’re using [MediaWiki] similar to Intel,” said a Honeywell knowledge management professional at Wikimania who didn’t want his name published. “We’re opening it up to the entire corporation,” he said. “In a situation like that, maybe only 95 percent of people lurk, and only 5 percent contribute content.”

One tool Honeywell is considering installing to boost awareness and participation in its wiki is a Real Simple Subscription (RSS) feed, allowing users to see changes and updates to topics specific to their area. [Wikipedia.org itself added RSS to its site last month].

“It would make it such a more valuable tool — to be able to subscribe to different things via RSS would be great,” he added.

Handling problem of wiki vandalism and mischief was also discussed widely at Wikimania, with recent buzz around the increased volume of low-level mischief on Wikipedia, as well as high-profile incidents of politicians altering their own Wikipedia entries with dubious changes, or disparaging rivals’ entries on the site.

“I won’t go edit the item on Wikipeia about Intel,” said Intel’s wiki guru Bancroft, “even though we may be doing a lot of cool things at Intel blogs or wikis,” which would be great to have in there, he added.

He said the stigma of public figures or corporations embellishing themselves on Wikipedia, let alone taking shots at rivals or competitors, is best avoided. “And, of course I won’t touch the AMD section on Wikipedia at all.”

On the wiki-vandalism front, VandalFighter is one tool that was discussed as a way to balance open access with content security/integrity issues.

VandalFighter is developed and maintained by Finne Boonen, a Dutch computer science student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. The open-source tool monitors MediaWiki sites for vandalism, and alerts site administrators to suspicious activity — edits from known abusive users or IP addresses, or large block-replacements of text, are some examples.

A function of the MediaWiki software is that it constantly sends out Internet Relay Chat (IRC) code with information on edits made to the site, said Boonen. “VandalFighter reads that IRC code and turns it into something useful to users,” she said.

Instead of listing the change history of the wiki site in one long IRC stream, the software highlights changes “which are probably suspicious,” based on user names, how much the user has changed things, and the article itself. “Big chunks of text disappearing is probably vandalism. Big chunks of text appearing is probably a copyright violation.”

Boonen, who has added downloaded articles on the OSI model to open-book exams, and written articles on beer and cooking for the Dutch version of Wikipedia, said the concept of security and vandalism/administrator cat-and-mouse is different in the wiki world from the traditional IT cybersecurity frame of mind.

“This is a whole different thing,” she said. Wiki administration “involves wanting to protect, but not wanting to protect too much. It’s different from concept in [corporate IT security] in that everybody who is not us is bad; [With wikis] it’s more like, the only bad guys are the ones we know are bad; everybody else is good.”