Wikileaks Pre-commitment Hashes and Wikileaks: A Primer
According to Wikipedia, a pre-commitment is "Precommitment is a strategy in which a party to a conflict uses a commitment device to strengthen its position by cutting off some of its options to make its threats more credible."
What does that mean in the case of Wikileaks? Wikileaks has provided its entire database of material that hasn't yet been released in encrypted form.
Anyone can download that database, but you can't see what's in it unless you have the encryption key (essentially, a password).
The idea is that if something happens to Julian Assange or Wikileaks, the key (or password) would be released into the wild, and all of the material would be released.
This serves as a deterrent to doing something to Assange or Wikileaks, since anyone who may do something knows that he is automatically releasing the information.
Hashes, meanwhile, are something used to check the authenticity of data. So the computer looks at a piece of data and calculates a large number that's unique to that data.
If someone else gets the data, he can calculate the same hash and determine if the data has been changed.
If the data has been changed, the hashes won't be the same. If the data has not been changed, the hashes will match.
The "pre-commitment hashes" that Wikileaks releases are hashes of its entire dataset, so that someone can make sure that nobody has maliciously changed the data.
Sauce:
https://emptylighthouse.com/pre-commitment-hashes-what-are-they-and-why-wikileaks-using-them-1636176907
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1109183075395780612?s=20