Wikis and Decentralized Action

The Gulf Coast disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina and the ineffective leadership during the follow-up is being addressed by many top-down organizations such as the Red Cross and the Pentagon.

A good example of a bottom-up response that shows the potential of the internet to help grassroots campaigns is seen on the PeopleFinderVolunteer page at Wikipedia. This decentralized effort allows individuals with a few hours of time to be part of the massive data entry job of entering names of lost people or people seeking loved ones into a database.

The goals of the project were:

1. Enter unstructured data on refugees from forums across the web to the highest data quality standards possible with volunteers giving a little as one hour of their time.


2. Enter data from databases across the web into the central database via the PeopleFinder Interchange Format


3. Minimize duplicate records


4. Support other organizations in implementing the PeopleFinder Interchange Format


5. Make the central database avaliable to be searched


6. Use the Salesforce API to implement innovative technology solutions to the missing persons problem

Within a few days, the project was successful. Here are a few stats:

1. Within 24 hours of the storm, more than 15,000 records were entered into the database.


2. To date, over 85,000 records have been manually entered into the central repository. Great Work! All 85,000+ records were entered manually from forums and other sites by volunteers.


3. Over 2100 people have created accounts in the wiki, one can assume that a vast majority of these accounts correspond with active volunteers.


4. The data from scraped sites has been parsed into PFIF, but has not yet been entered into the database. We would prefer that other sites implement PFIF so that survivor data can be exchanged among sites.

Instead of having these 2,100 people sit at home unable to help, they were able to pitch in and provide a valuable service. To see the overall Wiki response to the hurricane, visit http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/Main_Page.