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8/18/2019 WikiLeaks Digital Diagnostic - Lara Zaccaria
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W ikiLeaks:
Digital DiagnosticLara Zaccaria 14200346MKT42050 - April 2015
WIKILEAKS - DIGITAL DIAGNOSTIC 1
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Table of Content:
1. WikiLeaks…..3
2. Technology Profile…..6
3. Social Media Analysis…..9
4. Mobile Technology Profile…..12
5. Recommendations…..14
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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
WIKILEAKS - DIGITAL DIAGNOSTIC 3
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=
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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
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http://tools.quicksprout.com/analyze/wikileaks.org%2F
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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
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https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-wikileaks.1260454.html
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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
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http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwikileaks.org%2f
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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:
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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
WIKILEAKS - DIGITAL DIAGNOSTIC 8
http://www.brickcourt.co.uk/news/detail/court-of-appeal-finds-wikileaks-cables-admissible-but-dismisses-chagos-islanders-mpa-challenge
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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.
WIKILEAKS - DIGITAL DIAGNOSTIC 9
https://klout.com/#/wikileakshttp://tools.quicksprout.com/analyze/wikileaks.org%2F
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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
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http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/
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Image 10: Watson User Modeling Tool Analysis of the selected IAmA.
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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.
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https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwikileaks.org%2F
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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.
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http://appstudio.windows.com/projects/ed141003-b1ff-4b50-84a0-65ce5f9ef610/generation
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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
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