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Integrating Wikipedia With a Local Intranet Wiki
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a large company taking a preliminary look at developing an honest-to-goodness wiki. We have tried to launch a company-wide wiki before, but with little success. The technical domains of each part of the company are different, thus each article needs a good deal of background to be useful. Of course, due the proprietary nature of our work we cannot share our articles outside of the intranet. What we would like to do is leverage existing wikis by augmenting our internal wiki with an external wiki. When a user accesses Wikipedia from inside our intranet, they receive the wikipedia content, plus the local domain specific information. For example, links to company-specific wiki pages would be available in Wikipedia pages. Has anyone else tried to do something like this? I know it sounds like a logistical nightmare; are there any thoughts on how to make this successful?"
URLs. Look into it.
create a firefox addon that downloads a master list of wikipedia urls to add a link to the intranet site to. you can use regular expressions to parse the wikipedia source so that your link is consistently placed. the master list can be updated at will, and could probably be filled the first time with a simple database request. or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database
Download their database, put it into your system, and you're set.
Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be start with a complete dump of Wikipedia and add your own stuff to it. Their database dump page is here.
It is 2.8TB, however. They allude to a "Wikipedia API" for working on a "random subset" of Wikipedia; maybe that would be helpful too.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I assume you want up to date content and to have it clearly seperated from what is yours. Why not enclose the content within an IFRAME? Seriously, it's stupid and simple but might be all you need. Alternatively you coudl use some form of an intelligent proxy/page modifier, either as a mediawiki plugin or whatever floats your boat (i.e. every time a page is loaded also try to get the wikipedia stuff).
"What we would like to do is leverage existing wikis by augmenting our internal wiki with an external wiki"
What does that even mean? If you want to design something, you'll have to use more precise language. And for god's sake, stop using the word leverage without thinking about it. You used it backwards - if you are augmenting your internal wiki with external wikis, you are leveraging your internal wiki with the external wikis. You leverage a boulder with a lever, but you don't leverage a lever with a boulder.
Agreed. Appending to wikipedia is the ass backwards way to do it. Everyone suggesting greasemonkey and other addons are just enabling your backassery.
What you do is create an internal wiki, and wherever relevent you link to the wikipedia article. Or an external doc. Or nothing at all and expect your employees to look it up on their own.
You probably want interwiki.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Am I the only one which cannot see any legitimate uses for this hack.
Why lure your users into thinking the content is on wikipedia if it is on your network?
Can't your users use wikipedia _and_ your wiki.
Sincerely I think that the goal for this hack is luring users to think they're reading/editing wikipedia for someone's profit.
Why? Can't you just link to wikipedia pages where appropriate? OK, my company has an internal server we link through to sanitize referrer info so our internal wiki titles don't get all over teh interwebs. But if the wiki users can't figure out "hey, this article is too specific - maybe wikipedia has more general information that would help me," you've got bigger problems than your wiki management.
A very small part of My PhD looked at this (but with "collaborative textbooks" rather than wikis) -- see Chapter 4. Adding a very simple metadata-based navigation layer over the top of the wiki is pretty easy, clean (doesn't confuse users), and seems to do the trick. The wiki itself shows in an embedded frame. Of course, I had to go further and let students do difficult number theory proofs backed by machine reasoning systems within the book, but you won't have to solve that problem!
I'm (gradually) putting this fairly simple but useful part of the software into an online resource at www.theintelligentbook.com, though it's in my spare time and the system is down at the moment. I'll put my contact details back up there shortly in case the question-asker wants to discuss it technically.
Ignore the nay sayers. Of course there is a lot of value in aggregating content and creating a compound page that blends your internal content with other sources.
From a usuability and authority-of-source perspective, however, I think it would be best to list each source in a separate section on the page, starting with your internal content at the top. You can get to the other content either by embedding links into your internal content, or by collecting the links in a separate section.
Wikipedia itself uses the embedded technique. When composing or editing an article, the author can embed markup for external references. On display, this markup is turned into a footnote link at the point of embedding, and a footnote at the bottom of the page. I don't see why you couldn't do something similar. In this case, however, you would be embedding references to Wikipedia articles.
I don't see why you couldn't do something similar. In your internal wiki templates, have a custom markup for embedding wikipedia queries related to the article. On display, turn this markup queries either into embedded links to footnotes, resolve the queries and deposit them at the bottom of the page, or toss them into iframes and let the user sort it out.
The other technique is to have a custom form in your internal wiki template where you collect the cross-references. On display, turn these queries into links or resolve them into content.
In any event, why limit yourself to Wikipedia? Include cross-references to patent search engines and other domain-specific sources.
A big word of caution, of course, is owed to the legal angle. Make sure you follow the law whenever reusing anyone else's content, even if it's just a link. Have your legal department sign off on your reuse policy. Don't distract them with technical aspects of what you want to do. They're lawyers; they only care about the law. Ask them a specific legal question, such as, "what is our legal exposure if we republish (links to or actual content from) Wikipedia on our internal wiki?".
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