On 11 March 2025, British–Saudi-Arabian human rights organisation ALQST stated on X that Saudi medical doctor and Wikipedian Ziyad al-Sufiani (User:Ziad) had been released from al-Ha'ir prison "after over four and a half years of arbitrary imprisonment" for "editing pages like that of Saudi [women human rights defender] Loujain al-Hathloul".

A former editor and administrator of the Arabic Wikipedia, Ziyad was originally arrested back in 2020, together with his fellow doctor and editor Osama Khalid (User:OsamaK), and sentenced to eight years of imprisonment; Osama remains in al-Ha'ir Prison, according to ALQST, as he is currently serving a 32-year prison term, which had in turn been increased from a five-year term in September 2022.

Both were longtime volunteer contributors, having signed up in the late 2000s and since made tens of thousands of edits on a wide range of projects, attending conferences and contributing to projects like the Wiki Project Med Foundation. Both were particularly supportive of online global collaborations, known personally to Wikimedia editors in many countries, visible in their contributions, and notably absent from the communities in which they edited after their arrests.

Khalid and al-Sufiani's imprisonment, on the charge of "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals", first came to public attention and wider media coverage in January 2023, when the news was broken by the organizations SMEX and DAWN (the latter co-founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi). This revelation came amid a series of group bans of Arabic Wikipedia editors by the Wikimedia Foundation — including a quarter of that project's administrators — citing an investigation which had uncovered a group of users coordinating to push a political agenda who had "close connections with external parties [that were] a source of serious concern for the safety of our users". DAWN said that these banned users had been "recruited to serve as government agents to control information about the country and prosecut[e] those who contributed critical information about political detainees"; the WMF said that the DAWN report contained inaccuracies, and that there had been no evidence to suggest government infiltration. More in-depth analysis, including the Arabic Wikipedia's reaction to the actions, can be found in Signpost coverage of the January 2023 events.

By January 2024, both remained imprisoned, and an open letter signed by nine civil rights organizations demanded their immediate release.

While this is by no means the first time that names have been added to the list of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia, and will almost certainly not be the last, this release provides a moment of relief for those who have followed the case. Still, incidents like this serve to demonstrate the limits not only of community governance but also of Foundation support and oversight in protecting the safety of editors under authoritarian regimes.