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Two Wikipedia members sentenced to long prison terms in Saudi Arabia

“The Saudi government has infiltrated the Wikipedia team in the region at the highest level,” two NGOs said on Thursday. Two directors were sentenced to 32 and 8 years in prison.

Saudi authorities have “infiltrated” Wikipedia and sentenced two administrators of the participatory online encyclopedia to severe prison terms, a human rights NGO announced on Thursday.

An investigation by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent company, “revealed that the Saudi government has infiltrated the Wikipedia team in the region at the highest level,” the NGO Democracy for the Arab World said in a joint statement. Now (DAWN) and Beirut-based SMEX.

Two Wikipedia administrators, volunteers with privileged access to the pages of the online encyclopedia to modify pages restricted to the greatest number, were arrested in September 2020, they claim.

wikipedia infiltration

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 murder in 2018 was attributed by US intelligence to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which Saudi authorities deny.

“The arrests of Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani on the one hand, and the infiltration of Wikipedia, show a terrifying vision of how the Saudi government seeks to control the narrative and Wikipedia,” denounced Abdullah Alaoudh.

During this investigation, which began in January 2022, Wikimedia was able to “confirm that various users close to external actors were modifying the platform in a coordinated manner to advance the agenda of these actors,” according to the NGO’s press release.

Wikimedia evokes the Saudis acting on behalf of the Saudi government, say DAWN and SMEX, who trust “reliable whistleblowers and sources.”

Author: GA with AFP
Source: BFM TV

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