Will we be reading WikiLeaks in 2018?

With the rate of WikiLeaks releases seeming to slow in the last couple of days, I thought it was time to take a quick look at our current pace.  It’s been 15 days since WikiLeaks began releasing cables and 1,344 have been released so far — an average of 90 per day. There are 249,943 ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

With the rate of WikiLeaks releases seeming to slow in the last couple of days, I thought it was time to take a quick look at our current pace. 

With the rate of WikiLeaks releases seeming to slow in the last couple of days, I thought it was time to take a quick look at our current pace. 

It’s been 15 days since WikiLeaks began releasing cables and 1,344 have been released so far — an average of 90 per day. There are 249,943 cables still unavailable, so at current rates, we should have access to all of them in about… 7.6 years.

One thing to keep in mind: There’s a good chance that we may be running out of the good stuff.The pace of release is being largely determined by the group of newspapers who have access to the cables and are doing their own searches for interesting news. It seems quite likely that at a certain point, the Guardian, the New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde will decide that they’ve broken all the worthwile news in the cables and WikiLeaks will just post the rest of them.

Since a majority of the cables, though not a majority of those released so far, are already deemed "unclassified," redaction should become less of an issue as we move into the more humdrum communications.

That being said, FP plans to stay on the case for as long as it takes, bringing you the latest from the cables on this blog, or eventually via brain implant. 

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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