On the Internet there are two dominant ways to search for information. The first is to hit one of the search engines and let it do the walking for you. Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and a host of others will giv eyou thousands of possible matches on your search. This is great when you are looking for someone elses information - like an organization's web site. But when you want to understand a topic or a term better, this is a terrible approach to learning about it.
The second dominant way to find information is to go to Wikipedia and look it up. You will find a condensed description of the topic you are intrested in that has been created by 1 author or by 100. This is the "hive mind" that combines the ideas and knowledge of many people who want to be heard on a subject.
The government, military, and intelligence community all use Wikipedia like the rest of us to learn and to share information. But when it comes to private information within these organizations, they need something that is more ... well private. There have been a number of popular articles on the creation of the "Intellipedia" within the U.S. intelligence community. The organizations that make up that community have a reputation for being secretive about what they are doing and what they know, even within the community. Intellipedia is one attempt to leverage social software to bridge these barriers (notice that I did not say "break down" the barriers).
There is not yet a formally established Milipedia. Such a wiki might focus on specific military operations and be limited to those participating in the operation. It might address organizational policies and evolve as a compilation of the rules and what people discovered in trying to use the official system. It might be a living history of a specific unit that captures the knowledge over every living person who served in the unit. The number of military uses in uncountable.
Such a resource would transcend the official channels for describing a function, service, or unit. At a very basic level, imagine a wiki that spoke to the details of moving onto a specific base, all of the issues faced by families, access for special needs, schools, building locations, conditions of housing, etc. It might be started by an official office, but then grow as those who really went through the process made their contributions.
Imagine a more private wiki that captures the details of a city in which a military unit is operating. It might contain annotated maps, reports on patrols, locations of known threats, identify good observation points, IED locations, etc. What information would soldiers add to this wiki? How would it be richer than an information source containing only officially created information. Commercial experience indicates that such a wiki would be MUCH more current, perhaps even being updated wirelessly while soldiers are on a patrol or on station.
For more on Intellipedia see: