what is wikileaks

WikiLeaks is an international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.^[2] Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.^[5] The organisation has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.^[2] The Guardian newspaper describes Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, as its director.

WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award.^[7] In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances",^[8] a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya.^[9] In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".^[10] Russia extended its support to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange by issuing a statement which suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in the aftermath of the United States diplomatic cables leak.^[11]

In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.^[12] In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.

WikiLeaks was originally launched as a user-editable wiki site, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model, and no longer accepts either user comments or edits. The site is available on multiple servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.^[13][14]