After 18 months of reporting, interviewing and studying, Craig Pittman and I sat down to write a series on Florida's vanishing wetlands. We had interviewed hundreds of people, reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documents and analyzed satellite imagery for the whole state. In short, we had a lot of stuff to go through. And we had no real way to manage it all, aside from boxes, so we muddled through the old-fashioned way – with a lot of paper shuffling.
But it didn't have to be like that. A year earlier, Derek Willis of The Washington Post showed me how journalists there were investigating lobbyist Jack Abramoff and storing their information in a wiki. A wiki is a mouthful of an idea, but what it boils down to is this: it's a Web-based text database. Users can edit any page and add text, which the wiki software makes browsable and searchable. Wikis can run on a Web server, or they can run on your desktop.
To edit the wiki, all you or your users need is a Web browser. As for who the users are, that's up to you. You could set up a wiki for yourself on your computer. You can set one up on a server where you or a wiki administrator can control who gets a password and login. You can set wikis up to use your existing newsroom security accounts, or just throw the whole thing open to anyone. Now, more than a year after the first two stories in the wetlands series ran, we store nearly all of the information we collect for our continuing series on a wiki.
We have more than 200 interviews transcribed on the wiki, thousands of pages of documents stored, literally millions of words comprising our research, all organized and searchable. Instead of pawing through boxes or notebooks, I can type a term into the search area and find every instance of that term in all of our notes at once. For a follow-up story, I remembered that a source had talked about a specific issue in an interview we'd done a year before.
I typed in a few keywords, and the interview popped up in seconds. No quote, fact or idea we've had on the project is out of reach anymore. Our original wiki, which I hosted on a personal server, worked so well, and so many reporters in the newsroom wanted to use it, that we set one up for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times newsroom. Unveiled in late October, it's in its infancy. Wikis work extremely well managing projects, but it's an open question to see how they do in a daily environment.
The Reasons are simple: if the wiki is just for you, there are plenty of options for wikis that run on your computer. If it's for the whole newsroom, then your needs ramp up. I started our wiki on a personal server because I had no access to any servers at the Times, and none of our servers had the right software to run one. We now have two new servers running our internal wiki. Our IT staff bought into the idea right away, and we got what we needed.
A bright side: there's no need to spend a dime on software. There are several open-source wiki programs that cost nothing. Our internal wiki runs on MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, is open-source and free of charge. MediaWiki requires PHP, a free scripting language, and MySQL, a free database program that stores all your information. If you already have an Apache-based Web server in your newsroom, you can set up a wiki without spending anything.
With the back end set up, making it work is a snap, and it's an open-ended question. The wiki is a series of Web pages that are all linked together. How you create them and how you organize them is up to you. On our internal wiki, I've created areas by project, beat, bureau and down to individual reporters. Creating pages in MediaWiki is simple. You open up an edit screen (by clicking the cleverly named "edit" button) and enclose the name of your page in double brackets.
Let's say I wanted to create a page with this article in it. In my edit screen, I would type [[wiki article]]. When I hit "save," the wiki software creates a new page in the database – an empty place for you to store your text – and turns the words "wiki article" into a link. I could then click on the link, and it would automatically take me to an edit screen to add the text of this article. As soon as I hit "save," I can search for any word in the article.
Having searched for years for a better way to manage and organize the projects I'm working on, I've never seen anything better than a wiki. It's simple, sophisticated and extremely flexible. Every journalist I've shown the wiki has immediately grasped what it could do for them. It's definitely worth looking at for your newsroom. Contact Matthew Waite by e-mail at waite@sptimes.com.