Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/Special report

Wikipedians jailed for 32 and 8 years respectively
On January 5, 2023, we learnt that two Wikipedians, Osama Khalid (User:OsamaK) and Ziyad Alsufyani (User:Ziad), have been sitting in jail for more than two years, sentenced to serving 32 and 8 years respectively in al-Ha'ir Prison, a Saudi Arabian maximum security facility. The offenses with which they were charged, according to the press release that broke the news, were "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals".

The press release in question was published jointly by Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN, a human rights organisation co-founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi) and Lebanese NGO Social Media Exchange (SMEX). It said that Osama and Ziyad had been arrested on the same day in 2020, and sentenced to 5 and 8 years respectively. In September 2022, Osama's sentence was increased to 32 years after an appeal by the prosecutor; this reflects a recent trend in Saudi Arabia of imposing ever more draconian prison sentences for online criticism of the Saudi government, as reported by human rights organisation ALQST and The Washington Post. DAWN reports that in 2022, Saudi Arabia's Specialized Criminal Court sentenced women to 34 and 45 years of imprisonment for "tweeting in support of reform".

The DAWN/SMEX press release combined its report on Osama's and Ziyad's prison sentences with the news that the WMF had recently banned sixteen Wikipedians in the Middle East/North Africa region, including seven Arabic Wikipedia administrators, for alleged conflict-of-interest editing and advancing "the aims of external parties" (see Signpost coverage earlier this month).

The authors of the press release added:

The DAWN/SMEX press release was quickly picked up by AFP, resulting in a spate of media reports led by The Guardian and Middle East Eye, followed the next day by Ars Technica and many others.

While these press articles followed the pattern set by DAWN and SMEX, covering the sixteen WMF bans and the imprisonment of the two editors together, it is unclear what connection there is between these two sets of events, or indeed if there is any connection at all. Ars Technica hypothesizes that the prior arrest of Osama and Ziyad may have been related to Saudi infiltration efforts that led to the bans. The Wikimedia Foundation's Trust & Safety office has stated that the December 2022 bans were unrelated to the 2020 arrests.

Who are the jailed Wikimedians?
Both were longstanding Wikimedia contributors. Osama's first contributions to the English and Arabic Wikipedias date back to 2007. All in all, he made over 870,000 contributions to Wikidata, over 19,000 to the English Wikipedia, around 16,500 to the Arabic Wikipedia, over 16,000 to Commons, over 5,000 to the Arabic Wiktionary, and nearly 800 to Meta-Wiki.

Ziyad started editing Arabic Wikipedia in 2009, making over 20,000 edits to Wikidata, around 7,500 to Commons, about 6,500 to Arabic Wikipedia, and exactly 100 to English Wikipedia.

As medical students, both were particularly involved in editing and translating medical topics in Wikipedia. The Wiki Project Med Foundation, a Wikimedia affiliate specialising in improving Wikimedia projects' coverage of medical topics, issued the following statement to The Signpost:

Both attended Wikimedia conferences. Osama joined multiple Wikimania events in person, and participated in the medical meetups there (see images on Wikimedia Commons); he also organized the Translation task force, importing Wikipedia medical articles from English to Arabic (and from Arabic to English).

Wikimedia responses to press coverage
Responding to the media coverage, Wikimedia Foundation spokespeople highlighted "material inaccuracies" in the press release. According to Ars Technica, for example:

The Wikimedia Foundation also published a longer statement on the Wikimedia-l mailing list on 6 January, titled "Recent press around December Office Action":

Analysis
Notably, this statement does not contain any reference to the two imprisoned Wikipedians. On the other hand, it does express consideration for the people behind the accounts banned last month, whose role in Wikipedia has suddenly become international news, in a way the Wikimedia Foundation clearly had not intended during their initial listing of the bans.

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) Executive Director Sarah Leah Whitson, a Human Rights Watch veteran, responded to the WMF statements in an update to the Ars Technica article, added a few hours after publication:

These are important points. The WMF is now widely reported to have "denied claims the Saudi government infiltrated its team in the Middle East" – as a BBC article puts it – but this does create some inconsistencies. A month ago, on December 6, the WMF's Trust & Safety office issued a confident assertion that "we were able to confirm that a number of users with close connections with external parties were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties". The post stated that "these connections are a source of serious concern for the safety of our users that go beyond the capacity of the local language project communities targeted to address" and emphasised that the Foundation had issued these bans "to keep our users and the projects safe". But it has provided no information on who these parties threatening users' safety are, if they are indeed unrelated to the Saudi government.

The WMF statement does mention that the roots of the December 2022 bans lie in concerns expressed to the WMF about the Farsi Wikipedia some years ago. There is a public record of concerns about state interference in the Farsi Wikipedia being voiced by Open Democracy, for example, in a September 2019 article titled "Persian Wikipedia: an independent source or a tool of the Iranian state?", and by Justice for Iran in an October 2019 Radio Farda article titled "Critics Say Some Persian Wikipedia Content Manipulated By Iran's Government".

The DAWN/SMEX press release and the many press reports based on it did contain errors. The press release referred to "16 Saudi administrators"; as reported earlier this month in The Signpost, only seven of the ten banned Arabic Wikipedia users were administrators, and six of the 16 banned users were contributors to the Farsi Wikipedia rather than the Arabic Wikipedia. Moreover, Osama and Ziyad, the two imprisoned Wikipedians, were not administrators at the time of their arrest – both had had their admin rights on Arabic Wikipedia withdrawn years before. The reason? They weren't using them, both having scaled down their Wikipedia activity considerably in recent years, presumably to focus on their medical studies. Ten years ago, however, Osama had uploaded pictures of a number of Saudi human rights activists to Commons; Ziyad uploaded Wikipedia's image of Loujain Alhathloul in 2016.

The headline of the article in The Guardian read: "Saudi Arabia jails two Wikipedia staff in 'bid to control content'". This will have left many readers once again with the false impression that Wikimedia Foundation staff administer Wikipedia's day-to-day content and community processes. (There is a reason headlines are not considered reliable sources in Wikipedia – the body of The Guardian's article referred correctly to "volunteer administrators".)

The WMF's claim that admins have "no ranks", however, is less persuasive. Two of the banned users, for example, had bureaucrat and checkuser rights in addition to administrator privileges (elevated rights that require users to sign non-disclosure agreements). Moreover, the entire Arabic Wikipedia – a project with 1.2 million articles – only had a grand total of 26 administrators prior to the global bans (it is now down to 20). To a person in the street, surely that makes any of the 26 people administering the project "high-ranking".

Even more significant is the fact that the banned Arabic Wikipedia administrators include three of the four people who founded the Saudi Wikimedia User Group, the Wikimedia Foundation's official affiliate in Saudi Arabia – among them the affiliate's principal contact person. In total, seven of the ten banned Arabic users are listed as members of the Saudi user group. As for the other three, two, including one of the checkusers, say on their user pages that they are members of the Arabian Gulf Wikimedia User Group, which does not seem to be an officially recognised affiliate yet, and one (the other checkuser) says they're from Kuwait.

The Wikimedia Foundation made another statement on 8 January, saying, in part:

Arabic Wikipedia community statement
The Arabic Wikipedia community has released a statement on the global bans, adopted with 38 in support, 2 opposed, and 0 neutral. What follows is an English translation of the community statement originally issued in Arabic:

Wikimedia Foundation reply posted on the Arabic Wikipedia
On 10 January, the Wikimedia Foundation replied to the Arabic Wikipedia community statement on the associated talk page. It is the first Foundation statement to actually use the imprisoned Wikipedians' names. The reply was posted in Arabic; a machine-aided (Google/Bing) translation follows below:

Much to ponder
The WMF mentioned a change to the Non-Disclosure Agreement in the statements above. This concerns a document VRT volunteers, CheckUsers, Oversighters and Stewards are required to sign. The change, made on 23 August 2021, added the following words to the relevant page on Meta-Wiki:

This still seems weak, given the risk of decade-long prison sentences served in high-security facilities. Even if an editor's place of residence is only known to them and the Foundation today, there is no guarantee at all that others won't discover it at some point in the future. A checkuser whose identity becomes known to a present (or future) authoritarian government would not just be at risk personally, but could also be compelled – legally or otherwise – to collect user data and pass these on to state organs, putting other users at risk of prosecution.

There is much to ponder here about project governance, government influence on Wikimedia projects, and the vulnerability of editors and administrators to coercion and imprisonment. But the most pressing question is perhaps what we, as a movement, can do to help Osama and Ziyad.

The Wikimedia Foundation, DAWN and SMEX clearly got off on the wrong foot – it would be good to see them engage in constructive dialogue now, and pool their resources, at least inasmuch as our fellow Wikimedians are concerned. According to DAWN Executive Director Sarah Leah Whitson, who discussed the case with The Signpost, campaigning for their release at this point, over two years into their sentences, is very unlikely to do them harm, and may do some good.