Why Wikis needs a filter?

IF the Wikis saga proves anything, it is that the world still needs so-called "old media".

The 250,000 documents would have excited attention if they had just been dumped on the Wikis site, but they may not have made much sense. It is their publiion in newspapers that has turned the US cables into the media sensation of the yr, probably of the decade. Julian Assange is many things, but he is not a fool and the Wikis founder understands the need to involve mainstrm journalists in order to extract value from the volume.
When the site was set up in 2005-06 as an electronic letterbox for confidential documents, the plan was that simply publishing the material, unfiltered and without context, would assist freedom of speech and improve government transparency. Yet in The Weekend Australian Magazine in May last yr, reporter Richard Guilliatt, who held one of the first interviews with Assange, wrote that the site offered a "vision of a new kind of activist online journalism" but was "a bottomless labyrinth of raw data -- millions of words, often in foreign languages, about subjects that are arcane and impenetrable to the layman". Assange had hoped activists would decipher the material, in the same way they built Wikipedia, but it was not to be. The site carried sensational material -- the US government's manual for Guantanamo Bay; a Kenyan government report alleging former president Daniel Arap Moi and his cronies defrauded the country of $2 billion; confidential details of wlthy Swiss bank customers; and, closer to home, the 2395 (mostly pornographic) internet addresses banned by the Australian government -- but Wikis did not rch the huge global audience it now has until Assange began dling with mainstrm media.

Soure: The Australian