Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Online volunteers are "using collaborative wiki software to expedite the process of perusing thousands of pages of complex documents related to detainees held by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba." On dKosopedia, a wiki associated with the liberal group blog Daily Kos, some 80 people have signed up, "each taking responsibility for a specific set of documents and for publicly posting the results of their review." The 4,000 pages of documents were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act request. Clay Shirky, a professor in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, said the effort is "changing the way leverage is applied. The historical dilemma of democracies is that it's very hard to get large groups organized. So, paradoxically, the more widely distributed an opinion is, the harder it is to turn its adherents into an interest group."