Diplopedia

Diplopedia, billed as the Encyclopedia of the United States Department of State, is a wiki running on a State internal Intranet, called "OpenNet". It houses a unique collection of information pertaining to diplomacy, international relations, and Department of State tradecraft. The wiki may be used by U.S. foreign affairs agencies domestic and abroad with State intranet access. It is also available to the United States intelligence community and other national-security related organizations using the Intelink-U network as a mirrored, read-only archive. Both sites are rated by the government as sensitive but unclassified. The wiki on either network is not open to the public. Diplopedia is a project of the Office of eDiplomacy (eDip), located in the Bureau of Information Resource Management within the Department of State. Diplopedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project. The project was launched in September 2006 after a presentation by State at Wikimania 2006. The program began as part of a larger effort created by former Secretary Condoleezza Rice within the concept of Transformational Diplomacy. Under that plan, personnel utilized Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, communities, and virtual work environments to provide diplomacy to areas that have been underrepresented. The program continued under Secretary Hillary Clinton's vision of diplomatic Smart Power, which also relied heavily on new media to include the web, blogs, and wikis, in concert with commercial online media distribution including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. At Wikimania 2008, eDiplomacy revealed the state of the wiki as of July 2008. In a presentation entitled "Diplopedia: Wiki Culture in the U.S. Department of State", the overall Diplopedia project hosted more than 4,400 substantive articles, is edited by 1,000 registered users, and has had 650,000 page views. In January 2009, Diplopedia was among 27 online technologies named as "The Best Government Tech of the Bush Years" by Wired.