Two privileged administrators of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia were reportedly arrested by Saudi Arabian officials. The pair have been sentenced to 32 and eight years in prison for editing conflict critical of the government. The prison sentences predated a larger alleged Saudi espionage operation within the company which ultimately led Wikipedia to terminate each and every one of its administrators operating in the country.
The mass firings were the result of an internal Wikimedia investigation revealed by Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) an advocacy group founded by deceased Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. DAWN says it learned of the arrests and Wikipedia firings from sources close to Wikipedia and the jailed administrators themselves. Wikimedia did not respond to Gizmodo’s requests for comment.
Wikimedia administrators, sometimes referred to as editors, aren’t paid employees at the site. Instead, they are volunteers who are granted privileged access to the website which can include the ability to fully edit sometimes protected web pages. Additionally, in some cases, administrators can also reportedly delete pages and block or unblock certain users. DAWN’s report claims the alleged administrators close to the Saudi government became administrators and used those privileges to “control information about the country.”
The imprisoned administrators, on the other hand, were reportedly arrested back in September 2020 and allegedly charged with “swaying public opinion” and “violating public morals.” The DAWN alleges those arrests were politically motivated and came in response to the administrators contributing information on the site viewed as critical to the Saudi government.
“It’s despicable but entirely predictable that the Saudi government has prosecuted Saudis merely for posting content about the government’s human rights abuses,” DAWN Advocacy Director Raed Jarrar said in a statement. “But Wikimedia also needs to take responsibility for the fact that its authorised editors are today languishing in prison for work they did on Wikipedia pages.”
DAWN claims Saudi administrators were the 16 users Wikimedia revealed it banned in a public December 2022 announcement. Wikimedia, which didn’t provide details about the banned administrators at the time, said the users were penalised for “engaging in conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects in the MENA region.” Those removals followed an internal investigation started in January 2022.
“As Wikimedia projects have risen in prominence across the world, it has attracted increasing attention of those who would like to control the information published on it, for political or other reasons,” Wikimedia wrote. “Community members have addressed concerns of this sort for many years, but sometimes volunteers who intervene in such cases may themselves face retaliation for their actions.”
Following its report, DAWN called on Wikimedia to publicly reveal more details about its investigation, disclose a full list of the Wikipedia pages the Saudi aligned administrators edited and subject them to new review. Additionally, the group said Wikimedia should conduct an internal review of those edited pages and attach wrapping labels stating they were edited by a Saudi spy.
“The Saudi government’s infiltration of Wikipedia with government agents acting as independent editors, and imprisonment of non-compliant editors, demonstrates not only its persistent use of spies inside international organisations but the dangers of attempting to produce independent content in the country,” DAWN Executive Director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement. “It’s wildly irresponsible for international organisations and businesses to assume their affiliates can ever operate independently of, or safely from, Saudi government control.”