Intellipedia

Wikirama is back!

Here is a little something interesting: there exists a wiki for the US intelligence community called Intellipedia. It's not open to the public, but it is open to people in America's various intelligence agencies. Supposedly, it will lead to closer collaboration among intelligence agencies and help prevent another 9/11-style attack.

The Wikipedia page says Intellipedia was designed for the "youth" of the intelligence community, presumably because the newest spies are paper-phobic and would really like to debate how to defeat the Taliban on the Intellipedia talk pages.

All the information about Intellipedia seems to come from an era between 2006 to 2008. As far as I can tell, there aren't any news articles or even leaked information that mentions Intellipedia since that time. One has to wonder if the intelligence communities are still using it or if it has become passé in the intervening six years or so. Are the intelligence "youth" of today really longing for a wiki to share information on Russian troop movements? Or was Intellipedia just created in the Wiki-craze years of the mid-2000s, is now defunct, and has been usurped by Intelli-apps?

Here is the official Intellipedia page (known as Intelink), but you're not going to get any farther than this main page without a password.

Intellipedia

Wikipedia's gender gap

Ada Lovelace

October 15 saw Brown University host an edit-a-thon that was intended to boost the number of articles on women in the fields of science, technology, and other areas (called the STEM fields). You can read about it here. October 15 is Ada Lovelace Day, named for a woman who was both the daughter of Lord Byron and the first computer programmer.

There isn't really a way to break down the number of people articles by gender, but there are almost certainly more articles about men than there are of women. Think of all the big fields: world leaders, actors, athletes, explorers, scientists. For much of human history, these pursuits were male-only, and in our patriarchal world, are still dominated by males. If a new article about a person is created on Wikipedia, chances are its about a man.

A gender gap also exists among Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia's own statistics report that only 13% of editors are women, out of 19 million or so total editors. That lack of diversity has been acknowledged by Wikipedia, which has attempted to attract a more balanced group of contributors. The Wikipedia:Teahouse project has a 30 percent female participation rate, according to this Daily Dot article.

In case you wanted to edit some articles on women in the STEM fields, here are some pages where you can do so:

List of female scientists before the 21st century
Women in science
Category:Women scientists

However, the question also comes up as to why women should have a subclass of articles to themselves--why not simply put Marie Curie in a list of scientists? In other words, you can add articles on any woman to Wikipedia by starting at Category:People.

Good for them

Wikipedia largely alone in defying Chinese self-censorship demands

Wikipedia is all about information and knowledge, so kudos to them for flouting censorship laws.

Wikirama (an explanation)

December 2013 will mark the tenth anniversary of my first edit on Wikipedia. It's hard for me to imagine being a member of any website for that long a time, as I always have this idea that the Internet and everything connected to it is hyper-modern.

In honor of my years on Wikipedia, I've decided to start this blog. Wikirama will be my platform to share the weird, the notable, and the just plain interesting that can be found there. But it won't be limited to cool articles or pictures. From time to time I'll do a little analysis and share a few theories about what makes Wikipedia tick, and what Wikipedia says about us. There must be some meaning to it all -- you don't get to be the seventh-most-visited website in the world without having some content that everyone can appreciate.

Enjoy.

The Day The Earth Smiled - Earth as seen from Saturn, July 19, 2013