With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair | Hacker News Reader

With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair

wired.com

17 pointsjackfoxy10 comments

"Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange declined to comment."

I find this interesting considering Wikileaks was so quick to comment via their Twitter feed.

I'm still frustrated that WikiLeaks sent out a call for programming help months ago, lots of HN folks emailed offering to volunteer, and nobody even received an email reply:

http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=xEWMLiUYxu

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023663 this is presumably the story you wanted to mention

Sadly, the link was just to the main page and none of the several ways I tried (mediawiki's history, api, Special:Export, archive.org, or any of the wikileaks mirrors I tried) allowed me to figure out what their request actually was.

"Unknown or expired link."

Dup from 6 hours ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477410

No, that submission has no comments and no upvotes either, but it just offends my OCD (which I don't actually have) to see a duplicate submission.

Usually the system catches when I submit a dup and counts my submission as an upvote. Didn't happen this time.

The difference is that the article I mention is the bare URL, whereas the one you've submitted here has a load of crap on the end, namely:

   ...?
   utm_source=feedburner & 
   utm_medium=feed &
   utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))

Without all that crap the duplicate detector would've worked as intended.

Again, the suggestion I made some time ago would've caught it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215

That junk is automatically generated, and is frequently not noticed. It seems like it causes a large number of dupes both here and on reddit, but I think it's almost always an error. It's easy to forget or not realize that it will result in a repost because the system doesn't check for that. The trick of adding ?repost, etc is sometimes used to make a repost on reddit, but I don't think I've seen it here.

Also, I wouldn't argue that all reposts are bad. If it received 0 comments and votes, despite being an interesting article, perhaps a single, better timed repost is in order. I wouldn't suggest resubmitting it repeatedly, but I don't think that single resubmissions are more harmful for HN than good content being missed.

It's the OCD in me - I just get annoyed that duplicates keep getting posted without people checking. I know I'm in a minority, I know most people don't care, and I know some articles deserve a repost because they really were valuable, even if no one saw it first time round.

But I'll keep marking duplicates so people are at least aware that the item isn't new, and so that, with any luck, discussion doesn't get split unnecessarily.

WikiLeaks answer (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17461648435):

Wired says we are in disrepair.Untrue-upgrading infrastructure to deal with growth.You can help: http://bit.ly/cpxJWC

Reply on news.ycombinator.com