2011-01-17 Advanced Cablegate Resource Sites

Primary Resources for Cablegate

Wikileaks Official Cablegate Site
Wikileaks' Cablegate site is well laid out and easy to navigate, using the metadata navigation links on the left sidebar. This is the most up to date place to search for Cablegate material.

Drawbacks:

• No search function
• Some cables are retracted in new updates, and are not retained on the official site

LeakyLinks Mirror Monitor
If the official site is ever down, LeakyLinks keeps an extremely useful list of all of the some 2000 mirrors of Wikileaks site - sites that have signed up for the Wikileaks mass mirroring programme. LeakyLinks monitors each mirror and compares it with the official site to determine which of the mirrors are up to date, and which have fallen behind in their mirroring of all of the cables.

Leakfeed
Leakfeed.com provides a handy assortment of different feeds, in various languages, for those who want to keep as up to date as possible on the cables using a feed system. The feeds include the latest 50 releases, a feed for a specific cable, a feed based on search parameters, or a feed based on filter criteria.

Cablegate Database on Google Fusion Tables
While the cables are being released slowly, in batches, in collaboration with Wikileaks' media partners, a database generated from the metadata of the entire cache was released in November by The Guardian. The database contains certain fields of metadata from all 251286 cables, including the Creation Date, the Source, the Address, and the Tags. (It does not contain the Reference IDs or the Subject Headers.) This resource is invaluable for seeing the spread of all the cables, how many are yet to be released from a certain embassy, whether there were cables at a specific time, etc. It is a good place to check claims about as yet unreleased cables, too.

Privetbank Cablegate Anomaly Monitoring Site
Privetbank's site is unique and invaluable. The authors of PrivetBank site compare the contents of each successive release of batch torrents from the Wikileaks official site, and detect anomalies. It transpires that some torrents actually remove cables that had been released in earlier torrents, or that some cables appear with new redactions imposed on them. While there is little reason to regard this phenomenon with outright suspicion, since it may represent the detailed work of harmonizing redactions across an extremely sophisticated release operation, Privetbank documents this in painstaking detail, so that the practice can be subjected to proper scrutiny by the public. Privetbank also contains information about the "Unofficial Cables" - those cables that have been documented on the media partner sites, but that have not, as yet, been released by Wikileaks. The site is not always completely up to date, but is well made, has a sophisticated and pleasing interface, provides links to various mirrors for each cable, offers every torrent so far released for download, and offers a very useful tool for Wikileaks investigators.

Search and Archival Sites

The following sites address the lack of a search function on the main Wikileaks site, and also represent efforts by private individuals to present the data in a useful form that lends itself to investigative reading.

CablegateSearch
An excellent site. The search function is instant and intuitive, the cables are presented in an attractive and readable list, and can be expanded by clicking on the + button. A function is provided to add certain cables to a "cart" to be exported. Metadata is intelligently handled, expanded where abbreviations are used, and fully hyperlinked. The site also presents a fascinating tagcloud of the cables released to date.

CableSearch
Another excellent search engine for Cablegate, CableSearch also offers a tabbed interface whereby readers can explore and search within categories defined by metadata terms. The interface is clear and pleasant to use, and information is kept on how up to date the present database is. It is often easier to see what cables have been released most recently here than on the official site.

Dazzlepod
A neat and simple interface makes Dazzlepod a painless way of searching through the Cablegate material. Cables are also easily navigable by source using the links on the left. Dazzlepod offers a service whereby you can sign in to receive email and other alerts for specific releases. The tabs at the top provide some useful criteria for filtering the cables, one of which, indispensably, is the "Recently Updated Cables" where readers can see which already-released cables have been modified in latest releases, and compare these against their earlier versions.

Aftenposten WikiLeaks Wordle
Allows for analysis of cables from US embassies and consulates and provides an insight into what US ambassadors found interesting. The interactive wordle visualizes a word count of more than 200,000 messages between the US State Department and its embassies and consulates from 1966 though February 2010.

Kabels
An aesthetically very pleasing site, Kabels also provides some innovative visual navigation options. Cables are navigable by source embassy, and searchable on the left. A clickable colour-coded mesh graph heads every cable, showing the rest of the cables from the same embassy, with the level of classification represented by colour. Clicking on each cell of the mesh graph brings the reader to the corresponding cable. Kabels also implements a crowd-rating system for the cables, offering readers the choice of tagging each cable they read as "Interesting" or not.

OWNI Statelogs Site
OWNI is the group which prepared the applications through which the Iraq War Logs were released. OWNI released their Statelogs site at the end of November in anticipation of the release of Cablegate. The site is straightforward enough, with a slightly clumsy interface. Interestingly, it provides a facility whereby readers can sign in, and comment on specific cables - an effort to combine archival and crowdsourced reading.

Combined Google Custom Search - War Logs, Cables, & WLCentral
Our own dredeyedick created a custom search tool which uses Google to search both the Afghanistan War Log and Iraq War Log releases from 2010, and the Cablegate archive to date, as well as the WL Central site, for any entered terms. The search is quite useful, and raises the interesting question of whether it will ever be possible to search the combined coverage of all of the media partners on Cablegate along with the original source material. It is also accessible on dredeyedick's Twextra site, here.

Crowd-sourced Cablegate sites

The following sites are crowdsourced citizen journalism efforts to give Cablegate the attention and treatment it deserves by the internet community. The communities around them are still in development and appear to be seeking dedicated contributors.

CableWiki
CableWiki is a crowdsourced attempt to archive and document each cable that is released in an internationally amenable way. The central mandate of the CableWiki site is summarization and translation into languages other than English to facilitate the accessibility of key information by non English speakers.

CableGateWiki
CableGateWiki's stated mandate is to document, summarize and analyse each Cabelgate document in full, using methods similar to those through which Wikipedia was created. The site is facilitating a merger with CableWiki.

CrowdLeak
CrowdLeak is a successor project of Operation Leakspin, which was a project towards which the swarm moved after worldwide ambivalence about Anon's Operation Payback. CrowdLeak's raison d'etre is to scour the Cablegate releases for the most interesting and urgent revelations contained there, and to document them in a manner that is accessible to the public, and which is likely to activate individuals politically. The site engages in the summarization, translation and publication of cables, in German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. The site uses an innovative collaborative review process for publication of articles.

WikiSpooks
Wikispooks is a crowdsourced project designed to build a credible and comprehensive knowledge of "deep political structures and events." The use of Cablegate material takes a central role in this effort, and an editorial policy designed to arbitrate political disagreements as to source material is implemented. An interesting concept, using the MediaWiki engine, with some potential for good material.