Saudi authorities have “
infiltrated
” Wikipedia and sentenced two administrators of this online participatory encyclopedia to heavy prison terms, human rights NGOs announced on Thursday (January 5th).
An investigation by the Wikimedia Foundation, parent company of Wikipedia, "
revealed that the Saudi government has infiltrated the Wikipedia team in the region at the highest level
", the NGOs Democracy for the Arab World said in a joint statement. Now (DAWN) and SMEX, based in Beirut.
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Wikipedia administrators
Two Wikipedia administrators - volunteers with privileged access to pages of the online encyclopedia in order to edit pages restricted to as many people as possible - were arrested in September 2020, they claim.
They are Ossama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani, according to these NGOs.
They were respectively sentenced to 32 and 8 years in prison, said Abdoullah Alaoudh, director of research on the Gulf region for DAWN.
This Washington-based NGO was founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose 2018 assassination was blamed by US intelligence on Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which Saudi authorities deny.
"
The arrests of Ossama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani on the one hand, and the infiltration of Wikipedia, show a terrifying glimpse of how the Saudi government seeks to control the narrative and Wikipedia
", denounced Mr. Alaoudh to from AFP.
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During this investigation, which began in January 2022, Wikimedia was able to "
confirm that a number of users close to external actors were modifying the platform in a coordinated way to advance the agenda of these actors
", according to the press release.
NGOs.
Wikimedia evokes Saudis acting on behalf of the Saudi government, assure DAWN and SMEX, who rely on “
whistleblowers and trusted sources
”.
AFP could not immediately obtain comments from the Saudi authorities or from Wikimedia, also the parent company of Wiktionary.
Last month, Wikimedia announced in a press release that it was banning from its educational platforms 16 users "
who presented conflicts of interest when editing projects (pages) on Wikipedia in the Middle East and South Africa region. North
”.
These incidents come shortly after the US court sentenced a former Twitter employee to three and a half years in prison on December 15 for spying for Saudi officials.
