MANILA, Philippines – The furor over WikiLeaks’ publication of 251,287 United States embassy cables caught the world by surprise and draws the spotlight to yet another technology tool that can build as well as break.
Cablegate, as the controversy is now known, has unleashed a global crisis and that on the extreme even led Professor Tom Flanagan of the University of Calgary to call for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview on CBS News Network.
Whether Assange, now wanted by the Interpol and the subject of a global manhunt, is a hero or a villain in this new brewing info war, may take years to unravel. But long before the WikiLeaks drama made media headlines, wikis were already controversial.
The wiki way
Wiki, the Hawaiian word for “fast,” has taken on a new meaning in today’s context. Wiki now means a website that allows people or users (through the use of a software) to write, edit or remove content in its interlinked Web pages.
The most famous wiki is, of course, Wikipedia, which when introduced in 2001, opened the gates for the world’s unease over wikis. How can people with no or minimal expertise ever write or put together an encyclopedia that was formerly done by hundreds of academics and took years to write, edit and peer-reviewed?
“This is the new media: content created by amateurs,” wrote tech journalist and author Jeff Howe in his book “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.”
The operative word is “amateur” because the wiki paradigm rests on user-generated content or free contributions from people of all ages and backgrounds.
Ward Cunningham, inventor of the first wiki software, set the parameters for “wiki-ing” in his pioneer wiki website WikiWikiweb: “The content is written by the users — people like you and me. Anyone can change any page or create new pages.”
Wikipedia is not, however, the only viral wiki. Wikis serve different purposes and are deemed useful to their community of users. Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, the world’s oldest wiki, is a compilation of computer programming techniques and design patterns. There are many niche wikis, including WikiHow, a general how-to instruction manual; MyWikiBiz, a type of business directory that allows enterprises to write about themselves; PlanetMath, a mathematical encyclopedia; MedPedia, a medical encyclopedia built by medical experts; Javapedia, an encyclopedia for programming in Java; and there’s the Philippine’s very own WikiPilipinas, a Web portal, directory and almanac for Philippine-based knowledge.
There is also a search engine now for wikis — wiki.com — and Web services such as wikispaces.com that sell wiki software or platform to organizations, individuals or small groups so they can create their own wiki websites with easy-to-use tools for editing, uploading text, images, audio-files, videos and other documents and information relevant to their members.
But if you ask who leaked the diplomatic cables, described by WikiLeaks itself as “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain,” and before that a large cache of Afghan and Iraq war logs that caused these entire furor, the website claims it doesn’t even know.
The new controversial wiki
In Wikipedia’s “list of wikis” entry, WikiLeaks was described as an online wiki for whistleblowers, which allows people “to leak documents anonymously.”
In its own website, WikiLeaks said it is a not-for-profit media organization whose goal is to bring important news and information to the public.
“We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth,” it said.
In its Facebook page, it explained further that its operations is being funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public and that so far it has already received “over 1.5 million documents from dissident communities and anonymous sources.”
“WikiLeaks accepts classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. WikiLeaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first-hand reporting or material that is already publicly available,” it said.
The seduction for would-be contributors is anonymity and the site has taken great effort to provide “military-grade encryption protection” to its electronic drop box where users upload documents to make it as secure as possible.
“WikiLeaks does not record any source-identifying information and there are a number of mechanisms in place to protect even the most sensitive submitted documents from being sourced. We do not keep any logs. We cannot comply with requests for information on sources because we simply do not have the information to begin with,” it said.
This online collaboration among investigative journalists, an online news organization that uses high-tech media tools, and a faceless, nameless crowd that holds sensitive information with great political and social significance has left governments squirming in their seats.
Think about the privacy concerns stirred by Facebook that sent its half-a-billion users worrying over who could view their personal info, photos, videos and wall posts that they voluntarily uploaded themselves. It now seems very minor compared to the current predicament of governments and institutions being brought to the spotlight, and whose supposedly private, confidential communications are released to the public domain for the world to gawk at.
WikiLeaks, however, has to pay the price. A tweet from its official Twitter page on Friday noon, WikiLeaks said, “At one cable per hour, it will take WikiLeaks 28.6 years to release them all. Speed us up!” An hour later, another tweet: “WikiLeaks.org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks KEEP US STRONG.” In another three hours, the website had a new domain name: wikileaks.ch and its new IP address was posted on Twitter as http://88.80.13.160. Another tweet said it had moved to Switzerland.
For how long the website can survive the flight and the global pressure is interesting to watch. But one thing is certain, its popularity is soaring. Its 348,850 followers on Facebook on Friday morning ballooned to 508,124 by Saturday morning. By then, its Twitter followers had also grown to 338,357. While the website faces a very uncertain future, it is alive in the social networking sites and provides a blow-by-blow account of what it is going through.
Weapons of mass collaboration
Like all disruptive technologies, wikis have their own supporters and evangelists as well as their own critics and detractors. But for the tech world, there is simply no going back.
“The Web is no longer about idly surfing and passively reading, listening or watching. It’s about peering: sharing, socializing, collaborating and most of all, creating within loosely connected communities,” wrote Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in their book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.”
Every day, the Internet’s “billion” upload amateur videos and their very personal photos, write blogs, create and edit wiki pages, participate in scientific experiments, write code in collaboration with the developer community, or contribute to news reportage as citizen journalists simply because there is a means to do it.
Technology is cheap and the websites and online organizations that rely on eyeballs and the power of the crowd for financial survival are only too happy to harness this newfound amateur passion.
“Call them the weapons of mass collaboration,” said Tapscott and Williams. “New low-cost collaborative infrastructure — from free Internet telephony to open source software to global outsourcing platforms — allow thousands of individuals and small producers to co-create products, access markets, and delight consumers in ways that only large corporations could manage in the past.”
Depending on which looking glass you are viewing this issue, wikis and the WikiLeaks of the Web have either the potential to build a better world by (in WikiLeaks’ words) “sharing with readers and historians an evidence of truth” or to shake the very foundations of investigative journalism and how society works as we know it in the past. This is, however, for media scholars and political scientists to ponder.
“Technology itself is boring,” said Howe.”Technology consists of wires, chips and abstruse operating manuals... Far more important and interesting are the human behaviors technology engenders, especially the potential of the Internet to weave the mass of humanity together into a thriving infinitely powerful organism.”