As the political impact of sensitive diplomatic informationcontinues to reverberate, aset of Wikis spin-offs hopes to capitalise on the successes of the whistleblowing sitnd its Australian chief,Julian Assange.
The US and other authorities have down on Wikis and Assange since the site started publishing thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables that have embarrassed both theUS and other parties around the world.
Assange, who founded Wikis in 2006, seems to haveinspired a flood of new gossip-mongering sites. Ifjust a few of the copy organisations manage to provide useful information to the public, Assange's positive contribution to global civil societymight be more widely acknowledged.
In an interview with Forbes magazine the embattled activist said,"It's not something that's sy to do right" but then added,"it's helpful for us to have more people in this industry".
Here arefive notable new imitations of the Wikis model:
Logos ofseveral newimitation Wikissites that hope to benefit from media attentiononAssange'sorganisation.
Opens
The former deputy to Wikis founder Julian Assange has vowed to launch a rival site soon that he says will be more transparent than the original.
Run by Assange's former two at Wikis, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the site currently has no content except for a logo and the message "Coming soon!"
Domscheit-Berg has declined to go into the details of his dispute with Wikis but suggested the whistleblower site strayed from its mission.
"In these last months, the organisation has not been open any more. It lost its open-source promise," he told the OWNI technology website, adding that Opens plans to provid democratically-governed mns for information to be published, without itself being a publisher.
Domscheit-Berg, who was previously involved with German group the Chaos Computer Club, said Opens, alrdy on Twitter, would begin trials in rly 2011 andfeed documentsto bigger media later on.
Brussels s
This EU-focused Wikis imitator - with no connection to the original organisation - alrdy has a website and a Twitter page.
The collaborative of media professionals and activists says it seeks to "pull the shady inner workings of the EU system out into the public domain".
"This is about getting important information out there, not about Brusselss [or any other 's' for that matter]," the fledgling website said.
"That's why today we tweeted that we have decided to 'go dark' for a few weeks."
Trades
Established to "do to trade and commerce what Wikis has done to politics", Trades said its site had more than 60,000 pageviews within hours of launching.
Centred on business s, the siteis concentrating on improving its "Trades relevance score", which gauges the importance of revled documents.
The organisation was founded by Ruslan Kogan, of the Australian budget consumer electronics retailer, Kogan Technologies.
Trades relies on the "Trader Principle", which states "individuals and businesses should attain values from others through mutually beneficial and fully consensual trade, rather than force, fraud or deception".
The site will allow any source to post material directly - and anonymously - on its site. Rather than scrutinising data itself, Trades will rely on users to evaluate independently the merits of information.
But some Trades users have alrdy allegedthat the site is a publicity-grabbing"waste of time".
Balkan s
Set up by Atanas Chobanov, a Buarian exapatriate in Paris, Balkan s aims to follow in Wikis' footsteps by promoting transparency and fighting corruption in the Balkan region.
Users can submit documents securely on the site through an anonymous, encrypted file uploader. Site administrators have said they would review and publish files only after verifying the contents.
The organisation's motto is "The Balkans are not keeping secrets anymore".
The website summarises its purpose: "There are plenty of people out there that want to change the Balkans for good and are rdy to take on the challenge. We're offering them a hand."
Indos
Launched as Indonesia's answer to Wikis, the new Indonesian-language site has alrdy posted controversial documentsdetailing autopsy reports from an infamous national tragedy in 1965, according to an article by The Jakarta Post.
Indoshas also posted sensitive declassified documents describing a 1975 discussion about st Timor between former Indonesian president Suharto and former US president Gerald Ford.
Suharto is quoting as saying, "Indonesia doesn't want to insert itself into Timor self-determination, but the problem is how to manage the self-determination process".
But Indos, according to the Jakarta Globe newspaper,has reportedly been having technical problems making files publicly available.
The paper also said "the [Indonesian] government claimed not to be concerned by the website".
Source:Al Jazeera and acies
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