Technology

The WikiLeaks Crowdsourcing Begins

By Niraj Chokshi
Saved Stories

The task of analyzing, interpreting, and visualizing the 90,000 classified documents publicly released by WikiLeaks yesterday is certain to be crowdsourced as people around the world begin ripping into the newly available information. (For its part, The Guardian has posted a spreadsheet of what they call key "incidents" in Afghanistan -- "coalition forces' attacks on civilians, friendly fire incidents and Afghan forces attacking each other.")

MORE ON WIKILEAKS:
Marc Ambinder: "The Raw Data"
James Fallows: "A Vietnam Precedent"
Alexis Madrigal: "Changing the Media"



Interpretations of the data may be on their way, but in the meantime the Wikipedia community is hard at work maintaining its entry, as can be seen in the discussion page about the entry itself.

Even the transcription of this morning's WikiLeaks press conference is being crowdsourced. WikiLeaks created a Google document from its official account -- Wikileaks.transcripts -- that was shared with 45 users at the time of writing, many of them went to work transcribing the event as soon as it ended.

You can see the crowdsourcing in action, by either heading over to the document or watching the videos below. (Apologies for the quality and the annoying control panel to the right on the first video. A good video capture program is hard to find.)