This is a tale of woe and misery, but also one of hope.
Woe and misery
Our tale begins more than seven years ago, an age ago in Internet Time. A cloud (nay, another type of cloud than what may come to your mind in this Age) pervaded the halls of SAS' R&D division. Our internal R&D content, not unlike the desolation that lay before Mordor, reeked, "as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails of documentation upon the intranet about." While there was some centralized documentation (lo, over a million scrolls) entombed in a behemoth named Rdweb, each division, many departments, and even individuals ran their own web servers, writ with current reference and lore, interspersed with with obsolete and abandoned scrolls, and no one was sage enough to know which was which. Content was locked away in dungeons guarded by wargs, and only a few magicians knew the incantations to unlock the barriers required to cleanse and repair a tattered scroll or burn a scroll beset with lesions of deceit and trickery. When the Plague of Reorg swept across the land, old names were cast asunder, new names were forged, web servers were cleft, and Favorites, Links, and Shortcuts were rendered useless. A fell wind was upon the land.
Hark! for a new wizardry was growing in the land, one born forth in the fifth year of the millenium, sprung forth from the land called MediaWiki, and a new greenness emerged upon the meadows of Research and the vales of Development, and it was called saspedia. Its intendment was to be the common font of knowledge for how SAS R&D masters of wares both soft and firm could record their efforts for generations to come: an enduring and lasting home which would remain long after lordships and kingdoms rose and fell. Under the guiding hand of the WWW—White Wizard of Wiki—scribes could repair the Scars of Typos, the Fever of Incorrectness, and the dreaded Links of Red. In that first year, almost 600 new virtual scolls were writ; in the next, another 1,200, and saspedia has since increased in girth and growth, from 1 millipedia (0.1% the number of scrolls of Great Wikipedia) to 5 millipedia in the seventh years of the Era.
Alas, the weeds still grew and threaten to choke the fertile grain. Many pages were created, then abandoned. An invasion of Transient Content, culled from the Mireful Messages of Email Exchange, gained purchase in saspedia, though they fit its intendment not well. Some scrolls were tattered on the edges; lacked tendrils connecting them to related scrolls; many had appellations misleading; new and inconsistent terms were as rampant as mice in a moor; few scrolls were added to the Grand Scheme of Content Categorization. A band of weary yet merry folk, unlike Hobbits and unlike Dwarves, and fairer of face, emerged to tend the garden. Being strong of heart, they banded together and formed the Gansy of Gnomes Gardening Club, and endeavored to teach others the attainable craft Wiki Markup, the lore of Content Categorization, the satisfying magic of Attribution, and the alchemy of turning Links of Red into Links of Blue. Their greencraft established the four pillars of saspedia scribes: Context, Categories, Content, and Contacts, and word spread, though slowly.
Woe, for the readership and writership of saspedia was small, unlike the millions who sustain and fertilize Great Wikipedia Still, they continued, and christened journals to record their work, both completed and enqueued, and sought more to join their Gansy. Soon, the great Eye of Doc was consulted, and form and structure came to saspedia in the form and substance of Semantic Wiki, and with the blessings of kings and lords. Some joined the Gansy of Gnomes Gardening Club, but their tenure was short, and the gnomes were overcome by a raging Flood of Content. The Gansy sensed that their fellowship was breaking, and with time, they sought separate quests.
Hope
saspedia continues to grow. Individual gnomes contribute where they can. Some 20,000 scrolls have been penned by this twelfth year of the millenium, the seventh in the Era of saspedia. The original canons still apply, for saspedia is firm and immune to the Plague of Reorg, which has returned several o'er and o'er to scour the land and make way for rebirth of Improved Processes. Some lordships and kingdoms remain, for the Kingdom of SharePoint also arose in the land at the same time, and the threat of Opaqueness of Word of Redmond remains to this day.
But the White Wizard of Wiki is wise, and more and more adherents adopt that Wiki Way, for it indeed is exemplary in its Ease of Use: the Gansy of Gnomes left behind Guide Books and Templates to make the work light and quick. saspedia serves all, whether they wield of Sword of Windows, the Hammer of MacOS, or the Lance of Linux. The White Wizard of Wiki continues to ride forth on his inspiring steed, Collaboration. Though the Gansy no longer flourishes and is more memory than flesh, their legacy lives, and hope remains where heart is true.
Epilogue
The author created saspedia, SAS' internal wiki, in 2005 to address the problems of R&D's internal documentation. saspedia found executive sponsors and now is the official medium for authoring and collaboration on internal documentation, including internal development standards, processes, tools, products, infrastructure, teams and individuals, and much more. A project named iDoc formalized and facilitated cross-divisional collaboration on saspedia, using Semantic MediaWiki to classify content types (reference, How-to, requirements, plans, project logs, samples, FAQs, etc.), achitectural tiers, status, ownership and when the content was last reviewed.
There are over 5,000 registered peers, 20,000 main namespace articles, over 52,000 total pages, 585,000 page edits (averaging 11+ crowdsourcing edits per page), and 17+ million page views as of the date of this article's publication. saspedia's scope has since grown beyond just R&D. The Gansy of Gnomes Gardening Club is real; the author founded it as a non-threatening way to entice others to adopt the Wiki Way. The award at the right (including a real plaster gardening gnome) was given to saspedia Wiki Gnomes of note. But the idea never caught on and the Club has fallen into demise. Although the infrastructure (servers, database, etc.) is supported by our outstanding intranet support team, saspedia is still maintained and tended by volunteer gnomes, not a dedicated staff. It could benefit from dedicated staff who could create training material, assist new users acquire wiki markup skills, develop domain-specific templates, remove duplication, enhance connectedness, etc. Such is life in a large R&D organization where innovation and inventiveness is prized. Yet saspedia flourishes and the author's peers find new ways to use it all the time.
The author speaks on the use of saspedia and continues to serve as advocate and, with a small number of others, as wiki gnome.
Photo credits:
Volcano derived from Volcan Popocatepetl by M. Klüber Fotografie under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license;
Good morning, tulips by the author
