Not that it makes much difference, perhaps, but as far as I can tell from looking at archives of the Arabic Wikipedia sysop list, both the jailed Wikipedians (User:OsamaK and User:Ziad) had stopped being administrators around 2017, several years before their arrests:
Also not clear : the relationship between the infiltrated saudi admins and the arrest of the editors. it's not like the editors were anonymous and the infiltrated admins outed them, their profile and edit histories are right there on wikipedia for saudi gestapo to view.
nope. justice against political prisoners in such regimes is very expeditive. there's no actual justice, no case building. they just arrest dissidents based on snitches reports and torture them till they sign confessions
It's a red herring from the Saudis to point at the fact that many Wikipedia entries are already heavily modified and controlled by interest groups like their own. Why they would announce it this way is another question.
1. In 2020, Saudi Arabia arrested two Saudi nationals who at one point had Wikipedia admin privileges, for posting things that the Saudi state didn't like.
2. In 2022, Wikimedia did some kind of investigation and banned 16 users for a "conflict of interest", but didn't provide further details.
3. Now, whistleblowers are alleging that Saudi state agents had "infiltrated" the "highest ranks" of Wikipedia admins, that this infiltration is what enabled the arrest of the two Saudi admins, that the 16 banned users were those same Saudi state agents.
There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting anyone in the Saudi government.
> There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting anyone in the Saudi government.
Yikes, I hope this isn't true. It would certainly undermine the fundraising slogan of Help Keep Wikipedia Independent.
Honestly, Sadam was class A ahole. But all things considered, if the war on terror wouod have been about anything other than nations willingnes to sell oil to the West, NATO should have invaded Saudi.
Regardless of anything that did, or never, happened at wikipedia, NATO should have invaded Saudi years ago.
And certainly once they started openly dismembering people in their embassy.
As much as it's appealing to blame all of this on repressive, religiously extremist governments, the bulk of the blame is laid on the US for continuing to ingratiate our entire country to these assholes in the name of petro-profit.
The US is after all, a major EXPORTER of oil, and doesn't need Saudi oil except for adding additional profit to the industry...
> if the war on terror wouod have been about anything other than nations willingnes to sell oil to the West
your comment is confusing, I can't quite grasp what you're trying to say, but just to clarify:
The first Iraq War was about Iraq invading Kuwait.
In the period leading up to the second Iraq War, there were sanctions on Iraq and Iraq was not allowed to sell oil. Iraq (and France) wanted to lift the sanctions. The war was not about getting Iraq's oil, Iraq was begging to deliver it.
A Wikipedia admin is an unpaid volunteer (not a staffer) with access to extra functions of the MediaWiki software Wikipedia uses. They typically get these rights through a community vote like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminsh...
"Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools."
Note that this is still just a role within the Mediawiki software. They aren't actual sysops with e.g. access to the servers running the software. Only WMF has that.
The "free" encyclopedia jargon is a myth. Right now, there's an implicit caste system that determine who actually controlled the whole page.
Sorted by the lowest hiearchy :
1. IP edits
2. Registered new user
3. Registered old user, with a mobs of fellow old user, that could enforce anything in the name of "community consensus".
4. Administrator. An ascended registered old user with a mobs of fellow old user "supporter" who vote for them during the election session. They actually wield power to ban user, permanently delete someone contribution, and lock the pages. Abuse of power is rampant so far. There's no balance of power at all to fix this problem except hoping the majority of "good" administrator (and public outcry) finally oust a "bad" administrator.
5. A mobs of administrator. Any infightings inside the administrator circle could be overpowered by the majority mobs of administrator, all again in the name of "community consensus".
Political battle inside Wikipedia is bloody and i've experienced it first hand.
Oh, regarding the level 5 user (a mobs of administator), here's an interesting story :
"Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools."
Using original titles isn't a strict requirement. The guidelines allow editing titles if the original is misleading or clickbait, presumably as long as the edits are reasonable.
The title is confusing because it is poorly trying to mention the two potentially linked topics the article discusses:
1. Saudi Arabia jailed two Wikipedia administrators for their editing, arresting them in 2020.
2. The Wikimedia Foundation itself, in the last month, took significant action against editors in the MENA region [1], saying that they had inappropriate conflicts of interest in their editing and connections to external organizations, but also saying the "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." The Foundation directly banned 16 users, which included a quarter of the Arabic Wikipedia administrators.
While problems with conflicts of interest are common on Wikipedia, and I haven't been involved for some time, so my perspective might be out of date, these are generally discussed openly, through normal processes, even in major and acrimonious cases like Scientology. My understanding is that it's very unusual for the Foundation itself to take this sort of drastic action; they aren't giving many details, as they say there are both legal and safety problems with doing so.
So the question/disagreement in this article is to what extent these two events are linked, and in what way. The two rights groups want more information made public, and appear to be suggesting that the agents involved used their administrator status in order to pursue the jailed administrators. WMF is saying that it would be unsafe to reveal more information. It appears that WMF, however, is suggesting the safety risks are risks of retaliation against individual users, not necessarily information security risks.
I would speculate that what isn't being mentioned directly is whether any of the users either had CheckUser permission [1], or were able to convince administrators with CheckUser permission to provide information to them. Normal Wikipedia administrators do not have the ability to access information about IP addresses and MediaWiki-sent emails of logged-in users; only a significantly smaller subset of administrators with "CheckUser" permission can see this. My guess is that when WMF disputes the "highest ranks" claim of the rights groups, they are interpreting that as a claim that CheckUser was involved, and users in Saudi Arabia were being unmasked by that access, while it's quite possible that the rights groups simply said "highest ranks" without intending it to have specific meaning, instead just trying to explain "administrator" in a somewhat overstated way for a non-Wikipedia audience.
If data access was involved, then it would be very concerning. But I think it's quite likely that the banned administrators were administrators more to facilitate pushing views on pages and influencing decisions on banning users / etc, while their retaliation against users and administrators only really needed their participation in conversations to identify target users, and research with openly-accessible user information and conversations, along with the resources of a state intelligence agency with wide-ranging powers, to identify the people behind those accounts. It might be easier to identify a users with access to IP address logs, but if you are targeting only a handful of individuals, and you can monitor all connections in the country, there are likely many other options, like looking at connection timings and publicly-viewable edit times over a long period of time. And even then, this assumes that you can't simply identify the users by what they've said.
Assange threatened the Military Industrial Complex, the most powerful arm of the US government which all other parts dare not impede on under any circumstances. Similarly but far more broadly, these admins mentioned things the Saudi Arabian government didn't like. While the two corrupt governments are best of friends, they seem to have no sway in what the other does. See: bone saw.
Would it make a difference? Yes. It would give the US some moral high ground so that tin pot regimes don't have the 'US imprisoned a guy for reporting war crimes' defence.
Readit News
https://web.archive.org/web/20161008095137/https://ar.wikipe...
https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe...
https://web.archive.org/web/20171031110427/https://ar.wikipe...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180821114358/https://ar.wikipe...
Edit: Desysop logs (stated reason in both cases was lack of local activity, not any wrongdoing):
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
there must be something else going on
This is the timeline that I could gather:
1. In 2020, Saudi Arabia arrested two Saudi nationals who at one point had Wikipedia admin privileges, for posting things that the Saudi state didn't like.
2. In 2022, Wikimedia did some kind of investigation and banned 16 users for a "conflict of interest", but didn't provide further details.
3. Now, whistleblowers are alleging that Saudi state agents had "infiltrated" the "highest ranks" of Wikipedia admins, that this infiltration is what enabled the arrest of the two Saudi admins, that the 16 banned users were those same Saudi state agents.
There is a further implication that now Wikimedia is denying the whistleblowers' claims in order to keep from further upsetting anyone in the Saudi government.
See https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-infiltra... and https://alqst.org/en/post/extreme-jail-terms-in-saudi-arabia... (September 2022)
The Wikimedia investigation was reportedly going on from January 2022 to December 2022: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
So key parts of both stories happened concurrently.
Yikes, I hope this isn't true. It would certainly undermine the fundraising slogan of Help Keep Wikipedia Independent.
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
The Ars Technica article too now features an update from the DAWN director, responding to Wikimedia.
And certainly once they started openly dismembering people in their embassy.
As much as it's appealing to blame all of this on repressive, religiously extremist governments, the bulk of the blame is laid on the US for continuing to ingratiate our entire country to these assholes in the name of petro-profit.
The US is after all, a major EXPORTER of oil, and doesn't need Saudi oil except for adding additional profit to the industry...
your comment is confusing, I can't quite grasp what you're trying to say, but just to clarify:
The first Iraq War was about Iraq invading Kuwait.
In the period leading up to the second Iraq War, there were sanctions on Iraq and Iraq was not allowed to sell oil. Iraq (and France) wanted to lift the sanctions. The war was not about getting Iraq's oil, Iraq was begging to deliver it.
"Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools."
For more info see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
What about other languages? Aren’t there any admins for those too?
Sorted by the lowest hiearchy :
1. IP edits
2. Registered new user
3. Registered old user, with a mobs of fellow old user, that could enforce anything in the name of "community consensus".
4. Administrator. An ascended registered old user with a mobs of fellow old user "supporter" who vote for them during the election session. They actually wield power to ban user, permanently delete someone contribution, and lock the pages. Abuse of power is rampant so far. There's no balance of power at all to fix this problem except hoping the majority of "good" administrator (and public outcry) finally oust a "bad" administrator.
5. A mobs of administrator. Any infightings inside the administrator circle could be overpowered by the majority mobs of administrator, all again in the name of "community consensus".
Political battle inside Wikipedia is bloody and i've experienced it first hand.
Oh, regarding the level 5 user (a mobs of administator), here's an interesting story :
https://www.engadget.com/wikipedia-banned-seven-users-after-...
Why seven? Because you need to control a majority of administator to finally wield the ultimate political power across the whole wikipedia.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267223
1. Saudi Arabia jailed two Wikipedia administrators for their editing, arresting them in 2020.
2. The Wikimedia Foundation itself, in the last month, took significant action against editors in the MENA region [1], saying that they had inappropriate conflicts of interest in their editing and connections to external organizations, but also saying the "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." The Foundation directly banned 16 users, which included a quarter of the Arabic Wikipedia administrators.
While problems with conflicts of interest are common on Wikipedia, and I haven't been involved for some time, so my perspective might be out of date, these are generally discussed openly, through normal processes, even in major and acrimonious cases like Scientology. My understanding is that it's very unusual for the Foundation itself to take this sort of drastic action; they aren't giving many details, as they say there are both legal and safety problems with doing so.
So the question/disagreement in this article is to what extent these two events are linked, and in what way. The two rights groups want more information made public, and appear to be suggesting that the agents involved used their administrator status in order to pursue the jailed administrators. WMF is saying that it would be unsafe to reveal more information. It appears that WMF, however, is suggesting the safety risks are risks of retaliation against individual users, not necessarily information security risks.
I would speculate that what isn't being mentioned directly is whether any of the users either had CheckUser permission [1], or were able to convince administrators with CheckUser permission to provide information to them. Normal Wikipedia administrators do not have the ability to access information about IP addresses and MediaWiki-sent emails of logged-in users; only a significantly smaller subset of administrators with "CheckUser" permission can see this. My guess is that when WMF disputes the "highest ranks" claim of the rights groups, they are interpreting that as a claim that CheckUser was involved, and users in Saudi Arabia were being unmasked by that access, while it's quite possible that the rights groups simply said "highest ranks" without intending it to have specific meaning, instead just trying to explain "administrator" in a somewhat overstated way for a non-Wikipedia audience.
If data access was involved, then it would be very concerning. But I think it's quite likely that the banned administrators were administrators more to facilitate pushing views on pages and influencing decisions on banning users / etc, while their retaliation against users and administrators only really needed their participation in conversations to identify target users, and research with openly-accessible user information and conversations, along with the resources of a state intelligence agency with wide-ranging powers, to identify the people behind those accounts. It might be easier to identify a users with access to IP address logs, but if you are targeting only a handful of individuals, and you can monitor all connections in the country, there are likely many other options, like looking at connection timings and publicly-viewable edit times over a long period of time. And even then, this assumes that you can't simply identify the users by what they've said.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... [2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CheckUser_policy
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec-rightschanges/ar.wikipedia.org...
I don't know whether either of them used checkuser rights inappropriately, and I have seen no allegation that they did.
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So your suggestion is completely irrelevant.
Would it get this guy out of jail? No.
Would it make a difference? Yes. It would give the US some moral high ground so that tin pot regimes don't have the 'US imprisoned a guy for reporting war crimes' defence.
Dead Comment