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Integrating Wikipedia With a Local Intranet Wiki

Posted by samzenpus on from the mix-and-match dept.

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?"

4 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. bad idea by uepuejq · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Doinitwrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Don't by pfafrich · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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    • The wikipedia content will always be out of date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
    --
    There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
  4. Re:Business Talk is Stupid Talk by MrMr · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.