For the past three years, the U.S. intelligence community has been using a classified wiki called Intellipedia. Launched in 2005 during the shakedown of the intel community that followed the shock of 9/11, the idea exploded despite some resistance from the stodgy old guard. The site now hosts almost a million pages.
Intellipedia stays well maintained thanks to a dedicated group of individuals who “garden” the wiki, watching over their specific domains of expertise. Already, there are a handful of success stories. When problems arise, especially overseas, Intellipedia offers a place for analysts to react quickly and share information quickly.
All of the 16 intelligence groups in the U.S. make use of Intellipedia, so information has been able to travel faster than ever throughout the community, uniting the knowledge of those who work in different agencies but cover the same topics. Just recently, the site got a cosmetic revamp that makes it more user-friendly. By most accounts, including those of the impressed-sounding mass media, it is a great success.
Or is it? There have been reports of growing pains as the wiki goes from childhood to adolescence. Although the growth of Intellipedia was initially rapid and impressive, Chris Rasmussen of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has indicated that it is struggling to continue that growth rate. He says new people just aren’t joining in. The dedicated individuals who were there from day one have now added much of what they know, and the size of the wiki has plateaued.
To remedy this, Rasmussen points to successes in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department, which have started using the wiki for exclusively for some official reports, rather than always double-posting information both on the wiki and in conventional formats. This singular approach is crucial to the future of Intellipedia, Rasmussen thinks, as most agencies still refuse to trust the wiki as part of official process.
No one loves a stovepipe as much as the intelligence community, and there's been no shortage of mistrust of the collaborative wiki concept.
Early on in Intellipedia's existence, then-director of the National Intelligence Council Tom Fingar attempted to publish an official National Intelligence Estimate on Nigeria on the site, but saw it fail because of its lack of a formal thesis. It was finished in the traditional system of organized peer-review.
Greg Treverton of the RAND corporation told Time magazine that, regarding intelligence estimates, the problem is less about using Intellipedia to create the polished reports that have always predominated in the IC, but instead moving away from those reports altogether.
“Intelligence analysis should be a sense-making exercise, a process,” he says. “Intellipedia is ideal for that: if you slice it at any given time, you are saying, 'Here is the best state of understanding at the moment.'"
In any case, Intellipedia has a bit of an identity crisis on its hands. Will it remain as it is now, a great tool for those in the intelligence community to use at their leisure, which may occasionally produce a brilliant result? Or is it the future of intelligence analysis in the U.S., the spearhead of a total overhaul in the way the CIA and the rest of the agencies operate? Only time will tell.
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