A good example of the Wiki problem is at my Uni. My students all said how they needed a Wiki (woe I'm a dullard if I don't support their little socmed needs). So, we built it (remember this is the "user" community demanding it). They had many grandiose ideas of how they would use it. We populated it with course information, set it up, allowed some students editorial control (and the ability to grant it) and off to the races. We got stagnant pond water. It's still there (no real cost to leave it up), but the reality is that ONE wikipedia works, maybe a special one here or there. I know of one socmed web forum that tried a wiki too, but nobody participated.
I do reject a few things. The government intelligence community problem is not unique. It is a knowledge management issue (which is a lossy system). Wiki's are a form of knowledge repository but they are not the only ones. Small Wars Journal/Council is also a form, Amazon Answers (and others) are other forms of knowledge repositories.
The problem with most (not all) repository systems is they are passive/reactive. The issue with any technology is that it will likely be event driven and as a result not-predictive. Trend analysis and such strategies are flawed (if not we'd all be rich on the stock market). The best we can hope for is "best case" that fails rarely. I realize my compadre Presley has a bone to pick with the tech but, there are places where similar systems work pretty well if not perfectly. The imperfect, failure prone, immature technology that keeps getting referred to is over-hyped. Each of those criticisms are life cycle issues and in many cases development failures. You can't say all tech is bad and be any more relevant than the current failures in tech.
My personal belief (near religious zealotry) is that the only scalable effect that works is a mandelbrot fractal solution starting with the human being and integrating the technology. I'm far from the first person to suggest this strategy. The resulting solution is a person using technology and being replicated again and again with each smaller piece making a similar larger piece. This is how wiki's work but it isn't a wiki (if that makes any sense). Each person is a writer, editor, evaluator making thousands of judgements on each topic. Then larger groups and larger communities do the same. It is a known imperfect system (as many fake editing incidents prove). What we want to do with the technology solution is the same pattern of behavior only automate it as much as possible (the writing and data entry is all over the place being done by outsiders) and apply some filters to look for those outliers we're interested in. Will it be perfect? Not on your or my life. We still haven't reached Minority Report status and personally I hope we never do.
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