wikileaks digital diagnostic - lara zaccaria

8/18/2019 WikiLeaks Digital Diagnostic - Lara Zaccaria

1/14

W ikiLeaks:

Digital DiagnosticLara Zaccaria 14200346MKT42050 - April 2015

WIKILEAKS - DIGITAL DIAGNOSTIC 1


2/14

Table of Content:

1. WikiLeaks…..3

2. Technology Profile…..6

3. Social Media Analysis…..9

4. Mobile Technology Profile…..12

5. Recommendations…..14



3/14

1. WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is the non profit organization that became famous after the exposure of the co-

founder, Julian Assange. The website and its channels are entirely dedicated to thepublication of the most obscure secrets of every government and organization worldwide.

The main purpose of WikiLeaks’ website is to divulge information without censorship,supporting the freedom of speech and, at the same time, respecting online privacy and

security of its own users. For this reason, the most important function of the website is theGoogle-style search bar. This is not the common news-dedicated website, but it is anhighly protected platform devoted to the respect of the user.The website is also a gateway for other connected sub-domains: Edward Snowden’s

Courage Foundation, the CableGate Search for journalists and the online shop to supportall the organization activities, such as Assange’s legal expenses and technical costs ofmaintenance of the website.

After the Banking Blockade in 2010, the website accepts donations only through affiliatedand authorized websites, such as Freedom of Press Foundation and the Bradley Manningdefense fund. The accepted methods of payments vary from US Dollar, Euro, Bitcoin and

the less known Litecoin. There arealso different platforms thatcurrently supports the donationprocess: Paypal, Google

Checkout and MoneyGram.

On the main search index, suchas Yandex, Bing, Google andYahoo, WikiLeaks is performingpoorly for the main relatedkeywords, such as “information

leakage”, “julian assange”, “warleaked info”.In fact, the website disappears

from the first page results or

appears just on the bottomdelineating a poor SEO strategyat on-page level.

WikiLeaks’ PageRank is 82/100 ,1

and it is performing very well in

WikiLeaks analysis on MOZ Open Site Explorer, https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=https%3A%2F1

%2Fwikileaks.org

%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site= accessed 04-04-2015


https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwikileaks.org%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=


4/14

terms of inbound links. Considering all the important facts that went public through theplatform, it is obvious that BBC, The Huffington Post and The Guardian are the latestwebsites linked to WikiLeaks.

As previously reported, the website has different issues at an On-page SEO level :2

Considering the website usability, navigation and SEO strategy it is possible to say that

the creators of WikiLeaks didn’t exploited this functions to obtain a well performing

platform. In fact, it seems that they didn’t dedicate efforts to do it, probably because of thenature of the organization and the primary role that they wanted to give to the news.

Furthermore, when the sitemap.xml or the robots.txt is requested, it gives a 404 errorpage.

Heading tags Too long or too short heading tags

Meta Description There is not a meta description

Title tag The website’s title tag is too short

Keywords Keywords are not well integrated in the title tag, meta description tagand heading tags around the website.

WikiLeaks QuickSprout Analysis, http://tools.quicksprout.com/analyze/wikileaks.org%2F accessed 05-04-20152


http://tools.quicksprout.com/analyze/wikileaks.org%2F


5/14

It is clear that, in this case, WikiLeaks wants the entire website to be crawled by GoogleBot, still it is advisable to create a robots.txt file in order to avoid the crawling of differentparts of the website, such as the membership section or the error pages.

Image 1: Example of WikiLeaks robots.txt Image 2: Example of WikiLeaks sitemap.xml3

Also, there are no instructions regarding bots for advertising purposes because the

website will never track, measure or sell data from its users. In fact, Google Analytics isnot installed, as well as Google AdWords. For this reason, it is not possible to locate adscode using the Developer Tool.

As reported above, WikiLeaks has no sitemap.mxl, for this reason it would be better tohave one in .xml format, because the website has a lot of pages, instead of one in HTML.

In fact, considering the size of WikiLeaks, it would probably be better to have more thanone sitemap.

Considering the nature of the organization and its purpose, it is understandable that theydon’t use ads for advertising purposes on the main website.

WikiLeaks Sitemap created with XML Sitemap Generator, https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-wikileaks.31260454.html accessed 05-04-2015


https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-wikileaks.1260454.html


6/14

2. Technology Profile

WikiLeaks uses HTTPS as communication protocol, the website is built respecting theHTML5 standard (See Image 4) and it redirects traffic to an HTTPS/SSL version by default.

Image 4: The DOCTYPE with the “meta charset”, “http-equiv” and “name” attributes are

indicators of the usage of HTML5 standard.

The website uses nginx as a HTTP web server and the position of the company’s servers isunknown for security reasons, the last disclosed position was at Pionen White Mountains

data centre in Sweden.

Image 5. Entrance of the last known position of WikiLeaks’ servers in Sweden.

As CMS, the company uses SPIP , an open source publishing system perfectly adapted for4

collaborative working in a multicultural environment such as the WikiLeaks team.In terms of CSS usage, the website has a lot of unused CSS rules that should be reviewed

and fixed.

WikiLeaks Analysis on BuiltWith, http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwikileaks.org%2f accessed 08-04-2015.4


http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwikileaks.org%2f


7/14

Image 6 CSS Audit:

The website uses Bootstrap, one of the most popular CSS, HTML and JS framework fordeveloping responsive and mobile friendly websites. WikiLeaks has a personalized CSS

file after the default one.

Image 7 Bootstrap:

In terms of JS, WikiLeaks uses jQuery, the famous JavaScript library that let simplify allthe processes regarding animations, Ajax interactions and so on. Also, to support audioand video content, the website uses VideoJS, which is a simple HTML5 video player built

both with JS and CSS.

As specified in the previous chapter, WikiLeaks has currently no cookies and consequently

no need of an ad hoc privacy policy.Also, even though WikiLeaks is not an ordinary website, it is advisable to implementsome changes on its home page in terms of navigation and usability. First of all,considering the fact that the website’s main focus is spreading leaked news, the homepage

should be more clear with different sections for every type of news: editorials, latestreleases and archives. As suggested in the WikiLeaks homepage mockup (Image 8), thesechanges should be completed with a section dedicated to the selection of relevant news bycountry. In addition to these improvements a box for the latest events, meeting or scandals

should be positioned in the top right corner, to highlight the most important news of theweek selected by the readers.

Furthermore, the menu bar should be more clear and concise with simple sections and,most important, a link to every social media platform the organization exploits. Inaddition, a link to news feed and a fast way to send an email should be implemented.In conclusion, the “info menu” option in the menu bar, should have a drop-down menu

with the following site links:



8/14

Image 8: WikiLeaks website home page mockup.

! How to Search: an explanation page on how to search information within the websitefor journalists, users and lawyers ;5

! Advance Search Tips: for a specialized audience;! Search by Argument or Country;! WikiLeaks World Of Tomorrow: link to a series of talks hosted by Julian Assange with

some of the world’s most important people that are shaping the future of technology

and human rights;! Justice 4 Assange: direct link to support Assange’s court case;! Courage Foundation: website that supports Edward Snowden and its court case;! Free Press Foundation: organization that supports WikiLeaks;! Secure Ways of Contact: a detailed guide on how to approach a WikiLeaks

spokesperson and how to send documents and other files.

WikiLeaks is used as evidence in a huge number of court cases. http://www.brickcourt.co.uk/news/detail/court-of-5appeal-finds-wikileaks-cables-admissible-but-dismisses-chagos-islanders-mpa-challenge accessed 12-04-2015


http://www.brickcourt.co.uk/news/detail/court-of-appeal-finds-wikileaks-cables-admissible-but-dismisses-chagos-islanders-mpa-challenge


9/14

3. Social Media Analysis

In terms of Social Media channels, WikiLeaks uses:

The website has a remarkable social media impact spread across different channels :6

On Twitter, the online sentiment is positive, generally in favor or WikiLeaks activities.

Considering that one of the biggest clusters of discussion is on Reddit, a social networkanalysis is conducted to define the sentiment and the patterning of links among

WikiLeaks’ Social Media Channels

Facebook 2.673.008 Likes and 21,291 People Talking About This

Twitter 36K Tweets, 2.54M Followers

Reddit 32.965 Subscribers

Flattr 8.033 Flattrs Received from 2.334 People

YouTube 27.353 Subscribers

WikiLeaks Quicksprout Analysis, http://tools.quicksprout.com/analyze/wikileaks.org%2F accessed 13-04-2015 &6Wikileaks on Klout, https://klout.com/#/wikileaks accessed 13-04-2015.


https://klout.com/#/wikileakshttp://tools.quicksprout.com/analyze/wikileaks.org%2F


10/14

participants of the IAmA “I am Julian Assange, publisher of Wikileaks. Ask me anything.” because Julian Assange is the major influencer of the entire WikiLeaks community.

First of all, it is important to note that Reddit is an open social network dedicated to newsgenerated by the users and considering the time constraints and the scope of this project it

is advisable to refer to a pre-existing paper “Information and Social Analysis of Reddit” byTroy Steinbauer to note that, in terms of user comment graph analysis, the loose graphmodel prevail site-wide.7

Image 9: Steinbauer’s User Graphs Statistics chart (Entire Reddit)

With this in mind, it isinteresting to run a sentiment

analysis on the selected IAmA

to understand what kind offeelings prevails .8

The results show that 90% ofparticipants are open to apeaceful dialogue and areprone to challenge the statusquo with relevant suggestionsand clear solutions to real-lifeproblems.

It is also interesting to notethat 48% of participants areconscious of the importance ofthe discussed topics.

For Loose Graph model it is intended “User A commenting on User B is undirected edge between A and7

B” (Steinbauer, 2011)

IBM Watson User Modeling Tool, http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/ accessed 18-04-2015.8


http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/


11/14

Image 10: Watson User Modeling Tool Analysis of the selected IAmA.



12/14

4. Mobile Technology Profile

Currently WikiLeaks has no official app and the

website is not mobile-friendly at all. The mainlogo should be optimized as well as the

navigational functions. The differences from thewebsite are minimal, the mobile version givesmore importance to the “Archives 2006-2010”and “Editorials” sections and less to the latest

releases.There are also problems at JavaScript and CSSlevel that should be fixed .9

WikiLeaks has no direct competitors because it isthe only organization that actively release themost hidden secrets from all around the world.

This does not mean that the organization can notlearn from other players in the online news field,such as Der Spiegel or the CNN mobile version.

Considering that the main focus of the organization is to

reveal governments’ secrets it is vital that the website

and the mobile version reflect this intent in a simple andclear way. Der Spiegel is a very good example of it,giving a RSS feeds-style to the mobile version, which is

the most easiest way to do it.

Google PageSpeed Insights Analysis, https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F9%2Fwikileaks.org%2F accessed 18-04-2015.


https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwikileaks.org%2F


13/14

Image 11: Example of possible WikiLeaks app based on the website’s RSS feeds .10

(Created with Windows App Studio).

Windows App Studio, WikiLeaks App Project. http://appstudio.windows.com/projects/ed141003-10b1ff-4b50-84a0-65ce5f9ef610/generation accessed 18-04-2015.


http://appstudio.windows.com/projects/ed141003-b1ff-4b50-84a0-65ce5f9ef610/generation


14/14

5. Recommendations

As already suggested in the previous chapters, there are different improvements thatcould be implemented:

Areas of interest: Improvements

SEO - Better on-page optimization with a clear HTML structure and websitehierarchy according to the scope of the website (Refer to image 8)

Navigation and UX - More compelling navigational system with a simple menu to navigate bothon the website and the mobile version as specified in the relevant chapters.

Mobile version - Creation of a better mobile version using the recommendations on Chapter 4.

Mobile App

- Creation of a dedicated Mobile App with different interfaces according to the

target market: journalists, lawyers and citizens.- RSS feed and “Recommended” section in the citizen’s version

Social Media Channels

- Integration with SM channels to make share-ability easier with the presenceof dedicated buttons within the articles.

- Clear indication and connection to the SM channels on the home-page- Dedicated team for the administration of the channels to boost lead

generation and donations

Technology - “Pay with a Tweet” option on the most relevant reports to spread the wordfaster

- WhatsApp Messaging System to reach a wider audience


wikileaks digital diagnostic - lara zaccaria

Documents