(As for Wikileaks itself, they eventually released all of the cables without redaction.)
Yes, at first journalists from reputable publications guided the redaction process. However, Wikileaks also gave access to unredacted documents to some very dodgy people, including Israel Shamir, who may have shared documents with the Belarusian dictatorship, leading to arrests of activists (c.f. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/why-i-had-to-lea...)
Of course the unredacted documents were ultimately released. This was done, as I understand it, by a combination of a Guardian journalist revealing the password to a file that he thought was not public and WikiLeaks putting that same file on a server.
To quote from The Guardian: >>The newly published archive contains more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists; several thousand labelled with a tag used by the US to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger; and more than 150 specifically mentioning whistleblowers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/julian-assange-a...
I'm not suggesting that The New York Times or The Guardian are perfect - they aren't - but they have decades of experience balancing the costs and benefits of leaks and overall they do a good job (from the Pentagon Papers to today's report). By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?
Historians will argue that one for decades. However I've seen it claimed and argued by knowledgeable people that learning what the US thought about their local dictatorships was a major contributing factor that made the Arab Spring possible. Contributing to the freeing of over 100 million people from dictatorship is a pretty good counterbalance to the ways in which some dictatorships have been able to abuse the information released.
See http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/wikihistory-did-l... for information on how wikileaks contributed to starting the Arab Spring.
I think that's a highly speculative argument. In many of these countries dissatisfaction with the government, social inequality and major unrest have been going on for decades. The kinds of issues that the writer talks about have been discussed very openly in the Arab world (take for example, the Egyptian book and film The Yacoubian Building). I think Wikileaks may have contributed to this milieu, but I don't think it was revelatory.
I have every reason to believe that his opinion was highly informed. Certainly it is more so than mine. And if he gives Wikileaks credit, then Wikileaks likely deserves some credit.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-internat...
Who was arrested or killed?
> So I decided to grit my teeth and carry on. Dismay mounted, however, with the arrival of Israel Shamir, a self-styled Russian "peace campaigner" with a long history of antisemitic writing. Shamir was introduced to the team under the pseudonym Adam, and it was only several weeks after he had left – with a huge cache of unredacted cables – that most of us started to find out who he was.
> Press enquiries started to trickle in. A little research revealed his unsavoury history, but I was told Julian would be unwilling for WikiLeaks to publish anything critical of Shamir. Instead, shamefully, we put out a statement simply distancing WikiLeaks from him.
> There followed even more damning allegations. Shamir had been seen leaving the interior ministry of Belarus, an eastern European dictatorship.
> The next day, the country's dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, boasted he would start a Belarusian WikiLeaks showing the US was funding his political rivals.
> Scores of arrests of opposition activists followed the country's elections – but Shamir wrote a piece painting an idyllic picture of free, fair, elections in a happy country.
> Human rights groups demanded answers, amid fears that Belarus may have received material from the cables. No answers were supplied. Julian would not look into the matter.
Sorry, are we talking about actual events or is this fiction? Because that didn't happen.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/u-s-officials-re...
The US officially claims that there was little to no actual harm caused by the leaks.