Intellipedia

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Intellipedia is a series of three wikis that runs on JWICS, SIPRNet, and NIPRNet. They are used by the 16 agencies that comprise the United States intelligence community. It is not open to ordinary members of the public.

Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES) office headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. As of October 2006, it contained 28,000 pages and 3,600 users.^[1] It includes information on the areas, people and issues of interest to those communities. Intellipedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project.^[2] The ODNI says that the project will help revolutionize the prevailing culture of the U.S. intelligence community, widely blamed for failing to "connect the dots" before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Sister projects are running on the U.S. Government Secret-level network known as SIPRNet and the Sensitive but Unclassified Network (SBU). SBU users can access Intellipedia from remote terminals outside their workspaces via a VPN. The SIPRNet is intended to serve a similar purpose for U.S. diplomats and Department of Defense personnel who are the predominant users of this network. OSINT users share information on the unclassified network.

1 Intellipedia differences from Wikipedia
2 Why it was created
3 Potential problems for Intellipedia's success
4 Community
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Intellipedia differences from Wikipedia

Intellipedia also contains a great deal of non-encyclopedic content including meeting notes and items of internal, administrative interest. The wiki provides so much flexibility that several offices throughout the community are using it to maintain and transfer knowledge on daily operations and events. Anyone with access to read it has permission to create and edit articles after registering and acquiring an account with Intelink. Since Intellipedia is intended to be a platform for harmonizing the various points of view of the agencies and analysts of the Intelligence Community, Intellipedia does not enforce a neutral point of view policy.^[3] Instead, viewpoints are attributed to the agencies, offices, and individuals participating, with the hope that a consensus view will emerge.

[edit] Why it was created

Intellipedia was created to share ideas on some of the most difficult subjects facing U.S. intelligence and bring cutting-edge technology into its ever-more-youthful workforce.^[4] It also allows information to be assembled from a wide variety of sources and agencies, to address concerns that pre-war intelligence didn't pay enough attention to dissenting opinions on Iraq's alleged weapons programs.^[5] A number of projects are underway to explore the use of the Intellipedia for the creation of traditional Intelligence Community products. In the summer of 2006 a National Intelligence Estimate on Nigeria was started using Intellipedia as the main collaboration tool.^[1]

Richard Russell, Deputy Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Information Sharing and Customer Outreach said it was created so "analysts in different agencies that work X or Y can go in and see what other people are doing on subject X or Y and actually add in their two cents worth ... or documents that they have." "What we’re after here is decision superiority" not information superiority, he said. "We have to get inside the decision cycle of the enemy. We have to be able to discover what they’re doing and respond to it effectively."^[2]

[edit] Potential problems for Intellipedia's success

One common worry among Intellipedians and potential hurdle to Intellipedia's success is if agencies in the Intelligence Community respond by creating their own wikis, which would strip away the benefit of providing a "shared" workspace for different agencies across the entire Intelligence Community^[6] "It moves us away from homogenized intelligence," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA official involved in creating the new system. Dennehy stressed that disseminating material to the widest possible audience of analysts is key to avoiding mistakes citing an example where analysts from multiple agencies used the network to post frequent updates on recent events, including the crash of a small plane into a New York City apartment building last month and North Korea's test of a missile in July."^[7]

Some view it as a risk because it allows greater information to be viewed and shared^[8], yet according to Michael Wertheimer, Negroponte's assistant deputy director for analysis, the risk is "worth it." The project was greeted initially with "a lot of resistance," said Wertheimer, because it runs counter to past practice that sought to limit the pooling of information.^[9] He said there are risks in everything that everyone does, "the key is risk management, not risk avoidance." Some encouragement has been necessary to spur contributions from the traditional intelligence community.^[10] However, he said the system appeals to the new generation of intelligence analysts because "this is how they like to work" and "it's a new way of thinking." ^[11]^[12]

[edit] Community

An Intellipedia shovel. The handle says "I dig Intellipedia! It's wiki wiki, Baby".

Intellipedia champions award shovels to users to reward exemplary Wiki "gardening" and to encourage others in the community to contribute. A template with a picture of the shovel, specifically a trowel, was also created to place on user pages for Intellipedians to show their "gardening" status. The idea was inspired by the barnstar,^[13] which is used on both Wikipedia and MeatballWiki for similar purposes.