In the article, Assange endorsed the idea of what he calls as “scientific journalism” as the new way of doing journalistic work. He’s asserting that like any scientific study, anyone who makes a claim about something needs to publish the dataset that he or she used in arriving at the said finding.

This is one of the reasons why he and his volunteers are publishing everything they’ve got with regards to, for example, the State Department cables, which were obtained surreptitiously.

Assange and his people are leaving it up to John Q. Public to mine the data and find the information which purportedly enlighten us and help us become better citizens of the world.

While I agree with the notion of transparency and the value of a well-informed public, there’s still that concept of “world order” that we need to carefully consider. David Brooks of the NY Times talked very eloquently about this middle ground, and about the desire to prevent complete anarchy and social disorder by putting some sensible value judgment in releasing information, specially stolen information.

Fortunately, in this case, the general public doesn’t have a year of free time to sift through all the 500-thousand pages that Wikileaks intends to publish in the coming weeks.

This is where I think the mainstream media such as the NY Times, Washington Post, the Globe and Mail and others can play a pivotal role in sifting through the mountain of data and separating the chaff from the grain.

Through their reporting and analysis, the public has gained a new insight into the ways of diplomacy and how diplomats in the U.S. deal with a myriad of pressing concerns chief among them is Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the isolated nuke-loving country called North Korea.