Wikileaks - friend or foe of the public interest ?

Recent statements from the Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency describing Wikileaks as a 'non state hostile intelligence service' should not altogether be dismissed. A cursory review of the material released on the website reveals that the vast majority of the content constitutes intelligence leaks from Western democracies with no documents sourced from Russia or from China. There is some documentation about the Church of Scientology (but very old), some from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen but not much else in terms of other nation states with totalitarian regimes. Wikileaks is therefore quite biased in terms of what it releases or what it is able to obtain. Perhaps the potential threats from China and Russia, both of whom have counter-intelligence capability in cyber warfare is enough to deter Wikileaks from disclosures about those regimes or perhap's its more of a case of not biting the hand that feeds you.

Where to now for Wikipedia ?

Wkipedia remains an astonishing accomplishment despite the many predictions that were first pronounced that such an online encyclopedia which anyone could edit, would never succeed. Wikipedia has reached 25 million entries in 285 languages and continues to operate with additional coverage now provided by Google and Microsoft which draw content direct from the website. However a few challenges are starting to emerge which may yet affect the relevance and impact of the democratised website. Since 2007 the number of active online editors has been decreasing, the database of entries still has vast gaps of knowledge particularly covering developing countries and the website itself has come under attack from spammers and vandals.

The basic statistics for the website are revealing  -

• Number of edits (all languages): 1.29 billion (as at April 2012)
• Number of registered editors: 18.6 million
• Hours spent compiling the English version (up to 2012) 41, 019,000.
• Wikipedia editors who are male: 91 per cent.
• Average largest edits over a three month periond (2010-11) came from the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom - all over 1 million.  Russia and Japan are next with just under a million.
• Australia contributed 378,300 edits over the same three month period.

But will Wikipedia continue to develop at the same pace or will disinterest set in over time from the millions of voluntary editors ?

Social media - tripping up the unwary

 

The 2011 Jobvite survey in the United States is a reminder of how pervasive social media platforms and applications have become with a survey of 800 companies showing that 80.2% of the survey sample had used social media or similar networks to recruit staff. It was also found in the survey that 58% of the survey sample had successfully hired from social networks with 36.4% reporting they had no success. Perhaps the most revealing statistic from the survey data was highlighted recently (Feb 2012) by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) citing the figure that 45% of managers checked social media accounts before offering a job to an applicant and 35% had found something that stopped them making an offer. This is a salient lesson for all those with a web presence particularly in Web 2.0 applications to be careful about what information about them is publicly visible to other people. 

Wikileaking....

The role and impact of a site such as Wikileaks generates considerable controversy and various levels of animosity predominantly in Government circles. How useful are the thousands of documents being released for serving the public interest? In general terms while these may useful for an insight into US Government policy and international relations, the impact of Wikileaks is limited as other major world powers are not affected in the same manner. The United States is one of several key players with Russia, China and India being also critical to international relations and power plays. A number of smaller powers such as Israel and Pakistan also hold critical positions in world hot spots. In this sense Wikileaks is limited in its scope and arguably of limited value with only US material.

Online community supported data sources - How reliable is Wikipedia?

Recent research reported by New Scientist (25 July 2009) has commented on the wide variability of health information on the internet and the influence of the all pervasive Wikipedia. This is no surprise as a significant volume of websites providing health information are either commercial interests, copied articles from other unchecked sources, heresay or outright quackery. Of interest is the high ranking of Wikipedia in search engine queries whereby the website appears in the top 10 results for more than 70% of medical qeries in four different search engines.

How reliable is Wikipedia? Universities have regularly warned tertiary-level students not to rely on Wikipedia as a source for their assignments. However US healthcare consultancy, Manhattan Research, has reported that 50% of doctors in its research had turned to Wikipedia for information. Of note, New Scientist quotes several studies which have examined information on surgery, drugs and other health information and found the online resource to be entirely free of factual and free of error. The US National Institutes of Health hosted an event on 16 July 2009 with the aim of training health professionals how to edit Wikipedia's health pages.

Wikipedia has considerable value as a layman's tool and for providing an overview of health information. For the health professional the key data sources though will remain ones such as Medline, PubMed, BMJ, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Cochrane Collaboration and other peer reviewed journals.