Wikipedia talk:Leaks are questionable sources

Example leak problems
Parts from WikiLeaks because its known most and has biggest page

According to The New Yorker, when WikiLeaks posted its first document in December 2006, "Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyse it. ... The document's authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself." When someone said they were misidentified in a Julius Baer document as having a secret Swiss bank account Assange and Domscheit-Berg added a caveat to the document saying, "according to three independent sources" the information might be false or misleading. Domscheit-Berg later wrote that they made up the "three independent sources" and that the source had "included some background information he had researched about the bank's clients" that misidentified a Swiss account holder as a German man with a similar name.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg wrote that before WikiLeaks started working with media partners most verification of submissions was doing Google searches. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Assange "outsourced the burden of verification" of the Afghan War documents leak, the Iraq War documents leak and Cablegate to the New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel. Yulia Latynina alleged in The Moscow Times that WikiLeaks associate Israel Shamir concocted a leaked diplomatic cable for publication in the pro-Putin Russian Reporter in December 2010.

In 2012, WikiLeaks released a statement about the Syria Files saying that:"In such a large collection of information, it is not possible to verify every single email at once; however, WikiLeaks and its co-publishers have done so for all initial stories to be published. We are statistically confident that the vast majority of the data are what they purport to be."

In September 2016, The Daily Dot reported that WikiLeaks' Syria Files excluded "records of a €2 billion transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank," citing court documents. Softlem (talk) 12:38, 15 February 2024 (UTC)