Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Why Wikileaks Sucks

I decided to visit the site Wikileaks a few days ago when I was experiencing a moment of boredom mixed with burnout from work. For those of you that currently live on Mars or outside the United States, Wikileaks is the site that released over 100,000 documents about the United States' war effort in Afghanistan (and probably got a few informants who worked for the U.S. killed in the process).

After cruising around their site for a while, I discovered a document that I knew to contain some erroneous information. Without going into details, let me just say that I am affiliated with the organization in question and saw after five seconds that, while the document was purporting to be an "official document" of the organization in question, it was nothing more than someone's opinion who belonged to the organization, and a poorly formed opinion at that.

So, after searching for and not finding the button to sign up for an account so that I could join the 100 or so people who had already commented on the discussion for the document in denouncing it, I joined their chat session to ask for an account. After all, if the name of the site is "Wikileaks", I'm imagining that it should be similar to Wikipedia and I should be able to edit the site, right? No. After a conversation with one of their garrulous -- but not too helpful -- chat monkies, I was told that they had stopped allowing people to sign up for new accounts and that this would continue for the foreseeable future. Here is a screen shot of the conversation.

My session with a Wikileaks chat monkey

So, basically, Wikileaks publishes anything that they find damaging to an organization while the larger internet is unable to challenge the accuracy of the documents. It seems sucky to me.


Here is the result of a Google search for "hot Wikileaks girl" -- that Russian spy who just got kicked out:


Hot Russian Spy Girl

So, do you agree that Wikileaks sucks or am I being too harsh?
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