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Wikileaks

Even though, it uses the “wiki” technology, Wikileaks is completely independent from Wikipedia or any Wikimedia services. It is a combination of high-tech security, free journalism and ethical principles. At the beginning, it was very similar to Wikipedia, people from all over the world could share the information, opinions and news with everyone, but since the new beginning in 2010, the things have changed. Now, the news and confidential reports that are coming from all over the world are double checked and analyzed by Wikileaks journalist. After they read them, they verify them and decide whether they are “important” enough to be published. Sometimes, those documents are so confidential, they need to delay their publication, or wait for some significant time to pass, so they could protect people who are mentioned in them and so they could save innocent lives of people who are mentioned in documents (WikiLeaks, 2010). As I already said, Wikileaks has no head-quarter. Organization is financed with the money of people with good will. The main goal of this revolutionary organization is to keep their sources anonyms. Even though, there have already been some problems. Earlier this year, a 20 years old student hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail. Later on, he was arrested and convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice after WikiLeaks published e-mails. Furthermore, the lawyers are now trying to build a defense of Bradley Manning, who has sent an extremely graphic, high-quality video of a fatal U.S. aerial attack on civilians in Iraq, titled “Collateral Murder” (Yao, 2010) Recently, lots of critics have been made, which questioned the reliability of WikiLeaks. All the leaders now agree that the relations between countries will be much different, but based on what? On some articles that can be found on the internet? If the sources of the documents are anonymous, and if we don’t know what was the position and importance of the person who revealed them, how can we know if everything that is written is truth? (CanberraTimes, 2010) The answer might be in the WikiLeaks’ efforts to test the veracity of all news. They use traditional investigative journalism techniques and modern-technology methods to analyze that. They investigate motives, opportunities and claims of the apparent authors and they ask them to answer the set of questions. Even though they claim that they have identified the veracity of every document they’ve published so far, they leave some space for possible mistakes by saying that it doesn’t mean that they will never make a mistake (WikiLeaks, 2010). But if they do, even a small one, what will be the price? The important thing in their organization, which makes them different from the other organizations, is the inflow of the informations. Informations are gathered from all over the world, but strictly on voluntary base. After the information is in possession of Wikileaks, five people cooperate and decide whether it is important enough to publish it. The informations are shared with the whole world and anyone can access them for free. This structure would appear to be organic, but Julian Assange is considered to be the only and ultimate leader. He is founder, financier and only person who is making important decisions about the future of Wikileaks, so is it really typical organic?

Image No.

The image shows from what places around the world the informations are collected.

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This is the way information is collected and distributed according to author of this project

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