While researching online about a topic for a school research paper, it’s pretty common that a teacher will tell his or her students to stay away from Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has many sister sites such as WikiAnswers, WikiHow, WikiSpace, and numerous others.  The newest addition, WikiLeaks, was founded back in December of 2006, and has been a controversial topic ever since.

According to Wikipedia, WikiLeaks is “an international non-profit media organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks”.  In other words, WikiLeaks publishes documents that should be kept private and only be seen by a selected few, such as government organizations. 

Within four years, WikiLeaks has obtained access to more than 1.2 million documents.  After government officials saw some of the documents that the website has open to the public, they decided that it was enough.  On Thursday December 2, the government shut the domain down. 

WikiLeaks wasn’t going down without a fight.  According to The Wall Street Journal, the government officials and the WikiLeaks publishers have “spend the day in an international game of ‘whack-a-mole’ fighting to keep its service up and running in the face of political and commercial pressures”.  WikiLeaks has gone from domain to domain.  Originally started as WikiLeaks.org in the United States, it has now gone to a domain stationed over in France. 

The government officially has no control over WikiLeaks.ch.  The problem is out of their hands; at least, for now.