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?"

Comments

bad idea

[uepuejq]

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.

Re:bad idea

[jayminer]

Good idea. You can even use an existing add-on, Greasemonkey to do this.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Solution

[Z34107]

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.

Re:Solution

[mcrbids]

Dumps go stale, Wikipedia is updated all the time. I'd suggest something a bit more dynamic.

I did something similar (conceptually) as a dynamic help system for our web-based application, and had content in a wiki based on the URL of the page where the help message was to apply. In my case, clicking the "help" button on a page would make a proxy call to a private wiki to get the help menu content. If none was found, an email was sent to support desk and the end-user was given a web-chat prompt to tech support (with the URL prepended so that tech support could jump in, answer the questions, and write the help menu in one fell swoop)

In your case, start with your local wiki. Presumably you have some stuff in there already. Rename the articles as necessary to match URLs from Wikipedia.

Then, build a simple proxy server that rewrites wikipedia content to include a header of your local content. Probably 100 lines (or so) of glue code, and anywhere from a few man-hours to a few man-days coding.

The rest is all training.

Business Talk is Stupid Talk

[rm999]

"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.

Re:Business Talk is Stupid Talk

[MrMr]

As a non native speaker I find a dictionary quite convenient in these cases. so I'll do some back and forth translation for you here:

leverage (v.) -> opkrikken -> fuck up
augment -> duurder maken -> make more expensive
internal wiki -> krabbel zonder net -> off-line blurb
external wiki -> krabbel met net -> on-line blurb
existing -> nog bestaand -> not yet deleted

So the English to English translation is: "What we would like to do is fuck up non yet deleted blurbs by making our off-line blurbs more expensive with on-line blurbs".
Now that I can understand.

Doinitwrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

interwiki

[MadFarmAnimalz]

You probably want interwiki.

Don't

[pfafrich]

Merging wikipedia with you company wiki is a bad idea:

• The wikipedia content will always be out of date
• Changes made to wikipedia content don't get fed back into wikipedia
• Creates confusion as to what is and is not company information
• Trying to load the wikipeida DB locally is a headache due to its shear size