United States officials say they have created their own version of Wikipedia for intelligence agents in a bid to encourage US spy agencies to share information and transcend bureaucratic rivalries.
Launched in April, Intellipedia allows analysts and officials from a range of agencies to add and edit contenton intelligence topics in a collaborative manner through a classified internal web.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) says the project will help revolutionise the prevailing culture of the US intelligence community, widely blamed for failing to "connect the dots" before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The project was greeted initially with "a lot of resistance", says Michael Wertheimer, DNI's chief technology officer in analysis, because it runs counter to past practice that sought to limit the pooling of information.
"There were a lot of analysts who said, 'I'm never going to use this, this is a waste of time'."
The brainchild of a tech-savvy younger generation of spies, Intellipedia has grown to include 3600 users and more than 28,000 pages of content, according to DNI. Unlike Wikipedia, which is open and based on anonymous contributions, all edits on Intellipedia are attributed and the content is accessible only to those with security clearances.
Officials plan to expand access to their counterparts in Australia, Britain and Canada and say an unclassified assessment of threats posed by infectious diseases would be open to a larger group of users, including China. They say the system should produce more thorough and balanced intelligence assessments because the collaborative approach allows more analysts to be involved and retains a permanent record of each contribution - including dissenting points of view.
But opening up an analysis to a much wider group of users also carries greater risks of a security lapse.
"There's a risk you put a [National Intelligence Estimate] up on Intellipedia where you have tens of thousands of users who really don't have a need to know to see it, you risk that it will show up in the media, that it'll be leaked," Wertheimer says.
Despite the security concerns, Intellipedia represented a useful way around the more than 30 separate, incompatible computer networks that bog down communication between spy agencies, says James Lewis of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
