SAPO was born in 1995 at Universidade de Aveiro
becoming, some years later, Portugal’s leading portal, providing
internet access and web services to millions of users every day.
For years, SAPO is using wikis
internally to organize and share information among it’s teams members.
Wikis are great collaboration tools when integrated in the developing
cycle of a project for documenting purposes. They provide historical
changes, and are a natural repository for information provided by all
team members along the development process.
Some time ago SAPO started using
wikis externally, on services provided to it’s costumers and users.
Examples solutions range from knowledge sharing apps, costumer care
support solutions or to just publicize the portal public APIs
documentation.
The Portuguese version of Wikipedia is mainlly written in Brazilian Portuguese. Saber was based on Wikipedia‘s
contents (respecting the GNU Free Documentation License) with the
purpose of promoting the culture and knowledge from Portugal and
fomenting the writing of articles in Portuguese from Portugal. Other
localized versions were also made available to portuguese speaking
countries like Cabo Verde and Angola.
Some customizations had to be done to integrate the portal users accounts and some Mediawiki extensions had to be created to integrate other content. Scripts periodically merge Wikiipedia‘s content and pictures with Saber updates.
During the project several ideas came about. One of he most interesting
was to make available all geo-referenced articles to the community.
From time to time, all articles are scanned looking for geo-reference
info and made available to the SAPO GIS team, that makes them available through their API. Here’s an example of the POIs found on Saber versus the Wikipedia points that Google Maps reports on the same area.
Another wiki based project developed by SAPO to it’s parent company, Portugal Telecom, was Wikicare.
The main purpose here was to empower all costumers to collaborate with
each other, solving problems and make suggestions about the service,
support or billing issues thus helping Costume Care on it’s own
efforts. This wiki is still limited to costumers only, which are being
very active making contributions, but is expected to be made public in
the near future.
Wikis are a powerful and versatile tool that easily enable users
contributions, collaboration and feedback, which makes them the perfect
solution for this and future projects at SAPO.