Wireless telegraphy
A B C D E F G H I
JK
L M N O P R S T U V
XYZ
W
the Wikipedia is what thousands of contributors
worldwide have assembled. Wiki had become so
popular by 2005 that 400 delegates attended the
fi rst Wikimania Foundation conference in Frank-
furt, Germany. ‘What we are doing,’ Wales told
Sean Dodson of the UK Guardian (‘Worldwide
Wikimania’, 11 August 2005) is building a world
in which every person on the planet is given free
access to the sum of human knowledge.’ By the
time of the conference, the Wikipedia contained
over a million-and-a-half entries in 200 diff erent
languages, all contributed by ‘wikipedians’.
‘Never has such an anarchic idea produced
such a democratic outcome as the Wiki,’ writes
Iranian blogger journalist Hossain Derakhshan
in a posting on the OpenDemocracy website (3
August, 2005). Entries are made by specialist
volunteers, but its pages are open to contribu-
tions from members of the public, for the use of
the public: pose it, write it, alter it or any other
entry: ‘It’s as if for every single change in an
entry, a referendum is taking place.’
Subject to constant addition, rewriting, altera-
tion, Wikipedia has incurred criticism concern-
ing accuracy and reliability; by the nature of
such a vast, open and free compendium of the
world’s knowledge, this is inevitable. Used along
with other sources, Wikipedia is nevertheless
an invaluable fount of instantly summonable
information.
Windows See microsoft windows.
Wireless network See internet: wireless
internet.
Wireless telegraphy In the 1870s, James Clark
Maxwell (1831–79), first Professor of Experi-
mental Physics at the University of Cambridge,
argued that wireless telegraphy would be possible
by employing electro-magnetic waves. In 1885,
Welsh electrical engineer Sir William Preece
(1834–1913) sent currents between two insulated
squares of wire a quarter of a mile apart. Two
years later Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–94),
German physicist, proved the existence of radio
waves and in 1894 English physicist Sir Oliver
Lodge demonstrated how messages could be
transmitted and received without wires.
Similar pioneer work had been conducted
by Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937),
who arrived in England to further his ideas.
Supported by Preece – then Engineer-in-Chief
of the Post Offi ce – Marconi fi led an application
for a wireless patent (1896) and was soon send-
ing long-distance messages by Morse Code, fi rst
across the Bristol Channel and then the English
Channel. His telegraph was used to save a ship
in distress in the North Sea and it was rapidly
Wikileaks was also responsible for posting
dramatic video footage of a US helicopter
attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad, July
- Th e website’s issue of an 18-minute fi lm
entitled Collateral Murder attracted worldwide
attention, as did the ‘War Logs’, 400,000 fi eld
reports detailing the practice by coalition forces
in Iraq of turning over prisoners to teams of Iraqi
torturers, notably the so-called Wolf Brigade,
under the control of the Iraqi Ministry of the
Interior.
If the leaks already listed were not enough,
Wikileaks soon broke the bank in November
2010 with the airing of 251,287 secret dispatches
from more than 250 US embassies, described in
one paper as ‘an unprecedented picture of secret
diplomacy by the planet’s sole superpower’. Th e
cables made transparent what hitherto had been
going on behind locked doors. Referred to as the
US Embassy Cables, they revealed often dramat-
ically frank comments concerning foreign states-
men and politicians, royalty and public fi gures.
Regarded as the biggest security breach in
diplomatic history, the ‘outed’ cables caused high
dudgeon in the States from the American Presi-
dent downwards, the White House condemning
the leaks as an attack not only on the US but also
the international community.
In December a request from Sweden for the
extradition of Lasange on the grounds that he
had been reported for sexual assault led to him
being taken into custody in Britain and denied
bail, even though ample surety had been off ered
by friends and well-wishers. Concurrently,
companies such as eBay, Pay-Pal and amazon
either froze Wikileaks assets or refused to do
business with the organization. Th is prompted
‘Operation Payback’, described as a cyberwar,
where supporters of Lasange and Wikileaks
targeted the refusants online in a number of
damaging ways.
Further sensational and embarrassing revela-
tions concerning the treatment by US authorities
of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay became public
knowledge through the pages of the New York
Times and the UK Guardian (their information
obtained from Wikileaks) in the spring of 2011,
one story claiming that an an Al-Qaeda ‘assas-
sin’ had actually worked for the British MI6. See
islandic modern media initiative; sipdis.
▶David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside
Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (Guardian Books,
2011).
Wiki, Wikipedia Th e brainchild of Jimmy Wales,
and started up in January 2001, the Wiki is a
website everyone can contribute to and edit;
