There is an interesting example of Computer Assisted Reporting in the SQL database analysis (with source code) of:
US Military Equipment in Afghanistan (2007)/Appendix
published by WikiLeakS.org
This looks to be an interesting and well researched analysis of the source data, which looks to be plausible.
However, there are at least some minor points which could be clarified or corrected, e.g. the comparison of the costs of the anti-Improvised Explosive Device equipment programme with that of the World War 2 atomic bombs - the figure from the Brookings Institute source cited is nearer to $23 billion (adjusted for inflation), which is not quite the same as the $13 billion cited by the WikiLeaks.org article. The comparison between the two projects in terms of the proportion of the total economy or the number of top scientists employed , is also a bit misleading.
However, since WikiLeakS.org is still pretending not to have launched in public yet, the authentication and analysis which is supposed to magically happen through "the wisdom of crowds" is being prevented, because the wiki front end is still deliberately locked, except to the favoured few.
This is not an open Wiki project.
The other aspects of this "leak" seems to be the Press Release which the WikiLeakS.org people embargoed until 5am GMT on Monday 10th September 2007, but which the New York Sun, for one, seems to have ignored
It is entirely arguable that a website which claims to publish "leaks" , is in no moral or legal position to complain about the mainstream media jumping the gun on their artificial press release embargoes.
Suspiciously, if this was really an attempt at a media embargo, then the relevant pages should have been password protected for the favoured few journalists, rather than leaving them open to the public and to the Google search engine etc.
Either the WikiLeakS.org political activists are being incredibly naive, or, more sinisterly, they are trying to generate short term publicity and hype, at the expense of long term trust, just like so many other political spin and public relations media manipulators, who insult the intelligence of the general public.
We still await any details about what or when the next public stages of this project are.
We still await even a high level security architecture to be published.- this is not an Open Source software project.
Until then, we cannot trust WikiLeakS.org yet, which is a shame.
