By Beatrice Jeschek

While 101 Maltese cable messages (from the US embassy in Valletta/Floriana) were leaked, Wikileaks chose a general restrictive approach to inform the public.

Privileged media published only a few selected full reports, thereby delaying the spread of the information to the world. In the meanwhile, Wikileaks remains in the process of uploading one third of all documents.

“The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined. Keep us strong”, whistleblowing site Wikileaks announced via Twitter just before publishing the “Embassy Files”.

The statement raised high expectations.

One big problem regarding the evaluation of the leaked documents is, however, that Wikileaks on Sunday chose to publish only one third (250,000) of the classified United States diplomatic cable messages.

An additional 500,000 documents are to be released in multiple instalments over the next several months, the organisation said on cablegate.wikileaks.org.

“The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice,” Wikileaks argued.

In order to give a glimpse of what is coming up as the weeks go by, Wikileaks further referred to a graph that sorts the 770,000 documents into 100 topics.

Right now, the organization is no longer loyal towards its own name. This clearly alludes to the Wikipedia principle which is primarily based on that everyone can participate in and understand any discussions and decisions.

But Wikileaks does not any longer seem to be a Wiki.

The full archive of its leaks, going back four years, is as such no longer available on the website.

And more importantly, the big data corpi were first given to privileged partners who decided themselves how to inform the public; the organisation’s website on the other hand also uploads the documents, but confronts the public with a long waiting time.

This lack of transparency on behalf of Wikileaks could therefore become a boomerang for its credibility.

If the self-reflection of Wikileaks really includes a "news service for the people", as it puts the emblem shown above, then the notorious media partnerships with the Guardian, New York Times and Spiegel are difficult to explain.

Ever since the release of the Iraq diaries, Wikileaks has become globally known and no longer needs specific media as multipliers.

However, Wikilkeaks appears to diasagree and is still looking for more privileged partners. The organisation recently published information on how other media groups can apply for embargo access to the rest of the documents.

Considering how the selected media have dedicated themselves to the current data set, something else becomes clear: The diplomatic cables were much more difficult to present visually when compared to the Iraq war diaries.

This is not just because of the geographical distribution, but also due to the content: In contrast to the clearly structured military protocols the Diplomatic cables are sometimes lengthy reports and analyses: According to Wikileaks, those 250,000 published documents include 260 million words - seven times more words than in the 390,000 entries from Iraq.

However, Wikileaks still denied the public a substantive access to all documents.

Currently, only 280 complete files are to be seen, and the various media - except for the French newspaper Le Monde – chose to present only a few dozen documents in full length.



Spiegel Online also offers an "atlas" (see above), which is not very enlightening: Using an interactive timeline on a world map, readers can see how the allocation of 250,000 messages appeared over the years. This could be a useful tool if it was accessable through the items on the map to the respective cable - which is not the case.

The Guardian tried a different approach: The newspaper provides a static map (see below) that illustrates the distribution of the origins of the cables around the world. In addition, there is an application that delivers both the text of the cable and the appropriate article from the Guardian’s archive on selected topics, countries and individuals. This makes sense, as the cables are to be interpreted only in the very different political and historical contexts.


Unfortunately, the offer of the Guardian only extends to a dozen cables, excluding the 101 Maltese cables.

The other three media - New York Times, El Pais and Le Monde - did not provide any visualisation of the record at all.

This article was first published 30/11/2010 on maltastar.com.