I've been watching government slowly getting onto the Wiki bandwagon over the last several months.  It's been exciting to hear about it evolve in NRCan's internal wiki and most recently really take off with GCpedia (internal wiki).  Both sites have gotten a great deal of well deserved attention within the government and have won awards for their innovation. 

Wikipedia has clearly demonstrated that a community of dedicated users can produce high quality, timely documentation about a wide range of issues that concern them. Wikipedia is being used by everyone as a resource these days, and Wikipedia is based on an open source PHP/MySQL application called MediaWiki.  MediaWiki is used by a wide range of companies like Novell, Intel, Pfizer, Siemens AG, and a great many more.

Opening up government agencies to this type of decentralization is a big deal that should be acknowledged as it really is a cornerstone of discussions around how Government 2.0 would function. The social side of implementing a wiki, training people to use it and managing issues with hierarchy are huge and NRCan has really lead the way on practices for implementing this. 

However, there really hasn't been much if any software development that has happened to implement these award winning sites.  Just like Wikipedia, they are both using MediaWiki.  It's free to download, there are no licensing fees, it is stable and well tested, it scales very well.  If what you want is just a wiki it is hard to think of why you would go with something else. 

I am writing this post though primarily because there has been little or no notice that these two initiatives are using either an open source program or MediaWiki.  I've looked at references in GTEC, News articles in the Ottawa Citizen, and Canadian Government Executive, but didn't see a reference to either MediaWiki or open source.  The only blogs that mentioned either were ones that were clearly posted by open source advocates. 

The normal way that government would "[create it's] own version of Wikipedia", as the Citizen says, would be to write something from scratch in a 1-2 year timeframe using a team of at least 4-5 people at a cost of over $250K.  This is what is likely the approach that will be taken if the Government of Canada proceeds in developing a GovTube.gc.ca or Facebook.gc.ca.  

I expect that if NRCan had decided to use a proprietary wiki that we wouldn't have seen an implementation of GCpedia in place for the 2008 GTEC conference.  However, because Public Works could just download and implement a solution following the example of NRCan, I think that there will be far more collaboration between departments than one gets with corporate software.