I've been a lurker in /r/wikileaks since the beginning of the Podesta email drops. For a community dealing with a highly politicized topic, that subreddit seemed to work remarkably well.

That all changed a couple of days ago, when the sub added two new moderators on the basis that, I quote:

they were the first to come forward to ask if /r/WikiLeaks needed help.

Isn't that a little strange? if you need new mods, you don't just give the spot to the first two guys who put themselves forward, at least not if you have a community of tens of thousands of people.

Around the same time, many more bans and removals than usual started to happen, especially directed at people who questioned the integrity of Wikileaks and of the subreddit itself. As you can see in the post I linked above, the mod tries to dismiss opposition to these actions by labelling these 'shitposts':

The problem with these posts, in general, is that they take up space on the front page of this sub that pushes relevant submissions off. The shitposts, as you may, were effectively censoring relevant and sourced information vital to this sub's community.

The thread in question was locked and removed later on.

Following these events, many more new mods were brought in, with the team now mostly consisting of new hires. One of these, /u/Here4Popcorn, tried to make a "Let's clear up some rumors thread", which was locked and removed, with 30%+ of comments removed.

Currently, the subreddit seems to be under the 'oversight' of /u/AssuredlyAThrowAway, a power mod of over 70 subreddits, including /r/worldnews and /r/conspiracy. He posted this thread to explain his role and direction, which in my reading is using a lot of very vague language to imply that more transparency and freedom of speech will becoming without actually making any sort of firm committment to either.

I don't know what's happening, but it seems that the sub has been put on a completely different footing from the user-run, relatively unmoderated way it operated before. This supposed "chaos" that necessitated massive deletions of "shitposts" is something that I can't say I saw myself, and at any rate is something that could have easily been handled transparently, by engaging the community in the question of how to handle the issue, rather than bringing in a ton of new mods and deciding that new detailed rules and a ton of bans are what's needed.