1/ 🧵 Here are some of the things about the alleged #Saudi interference in #Wikipedia, the related bans of Arabic Wikipedia admins enachted by the #Wikimedia Foundation, and the Wikipedians jailed in Saudi Arabia that keep getting missed, or are misreported.
2/ The two Wikipedians jailed for 8 and 32 years respectively were arrested in summer 2020. One had his sentence increased from 5 to 32 years in summer 2022. dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-g… They were volunteer editors – hobbyists, not Wikimedia staff.
3/ Neither of the jailed Wikipedians was an administrator at the time of their arrest. They had their admin rights withdrawn years before, because they weren’t using them: xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschang… xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschang… They were still active editors though.
4/ The #Wikimedia Foundation statement on press reporting of the story made no reference to the two Wikipedians jailed for 8 and 32 years respectively. lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/lis… @sarahleah1
5/ Wikimedia has now added that the bans were “not connected to the arrest of these two users” but has made no comment about the length of the prison sentences. lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/lis…
6/ Only seven of the users banned by the #Wikimedia Foundation were Arabic Wikipedia administrators. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia… Three were ordinary users, and six were users of Farsi Wikipedia. All were hobbyists, none were staff.
7/ Two of the banned Arabic Wikipedia admins had bureaucrat and checkuser rights, giving them potential access to users' IP addresses. (No one to my knowledge has suggested they misused those rights.) lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/lis…
8/ Given that before the bans the entire Arabic Wikipedia only had 26 administrators, any one of them – not just the two "bureaucrats" and "checkusers" – could with some justification be described as "high-ranking". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…
9/ The bans have been described as a "disaster" in the Arabic Wikipedia community. There was no advance warning of the bans, no possibility of appeal. The action is seen as profoundly incompatible with Wikipedia's decentralized governance model. en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti…
10/ The most glaring gap in #Wikimedia communications on this matter is that there is a confident statement from WMF that "users with close connections with external parties were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties" ...
11/ ... but no information whatsoever on who these confidently identified "external parties" are – there is only a very prominently disseminated statement that Wikimedia "has denied claims the Saudi government infiltrated its team in the Middle East." bbc.co.uk/news/world-mid…
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