Wikileads

Want a peek at how Wikileaks operates? The site’s special pages section has tons of data about site usage, including who’s updating which pages, which articles are the most popular, and which users have lost their editing privileges.

Where the updates are:

• The most revised article is this one, US Military Equipment in Afghanistan. It has been revised 221 times.
• Second most revised: the homepage
• Only about 80 of the 1152 articles have been revised more than 10 times, and almost 600 have been revised only twice.

Few know all the secrets:

• According to these statistics, Wikileaks has more than 1300 users, but only 10 have full administrative rights.

Smoking out dissenters:

• Eleven users have been banned from Wikileaks. Some of their offenses: Scientology-related finagling, removing content from pages, inserting false information, and using Wikileaks to send spam.

Most linked-to pages:

• No. 1 on the list: the Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms
• Of the top 10, eight involve the US Army, and the other two are about NATO

A bit of control from the top:

• Only a few of Wikileaks’ 1150 or so pages are fully protected.
• One that stands out: the Wikileaks PGP keys, which gained attention a few weeks ago because Wikileaks keeps them private.

The Special page also links to site-change logs, page rankings by popularity, lists of wanted categories and pages, and other interesting data.