In Januari 2025 The Signpost wrote about an American organisations who attempts to identify and target Wikipedia contributors for their contributions to Wikipedia, by exposing identity and other threats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2025-01-15/In_the_media
Unrelated to the organisation mentioned in The Signpost, this is already happing at this moment towards users of the French Wikipedia. In the past days the French Wikipedia community got allarmed that one of its contributors was the victim of such an attack, and became the victim of threats and intimidation by a journalist from the weekly magazine Le Point <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>, Erwan Seznec. This journalist tried to make his profession and identity publicly available as revenge for his contributions to the encyclopedia. The French community has reacted quickly by writing an open letter, published this morning, in what hundreds of volunteers have shown their support to this (and other user(s) who got attacked by this magazine. I believe strongly that within Wikimedia we need to be open about such events and support the ones who have become victim. For that purpose I translated the open letter <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Lettre_ouverte_:_non_%C3%A0_l%27intimidation_des_contributeurs_b%C3%A9n%C3%A9voles> from French to English, so that anyone can read it. See below. Romaine We, volunteers contributing to Wikipedia in French, give our full support to our peer who become the target of intimidating emails by a journalist from *Le Point <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>* magazine, threatening to reveal his identity and profession. In this text, we wish to recall the importance of *respecting the pseudonymity of Wikipedia volunteers* as well as the operating principles of the collaborative encyclopedia. On Saturday, February 15, after contributing to the Wikipedia article dedicated to the newspaper *Le Point <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>*, the volunteer contributor to Wikipedia for 18 years, author of more than 30,000 modifications, had the very unpleasant surprise of receiving an email sent from the professional address of Erwan Seznec, a journalist at *Le Point*, which included the following comments: "We are going to write an article about you, on our site, giving your identity, your position, and requesting an official reaction from [his supposed employer]. » The same journalist also obtained the user's personal telephone number and contacted him through this means. *The comments made in these emails are explicitly threatening and are, as such, completely unacceptable.* Editorial disagreements, which are quite common on Wikipedia, are settled by debates on the discussion page of the article in question, in accordance with the rules of etiquette. These threatening comments come after the dissemination of supposed personal information about several other volunteer contributors in an article in *Le Point* dated December 13, 2024 <https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/wikipedia-plongee-dans-la-fabrique-d-une-manipulation-13-12-2024-2577881_23.php>, already signed by Erwan Seznec. These procedures, unprecedented in the mainstream French press, do not fall within the scope of free criticism, to which Wikipedia is regularly subjected — which is perfectly legitimate. They do not seem to us to respect the ethics of journalism or to be part of a journalistic approach for the citizens' right to information, but rather to fall within the scope of score-settling or intimidation. They pose a problem for several reasons: - A practice like Seznec's exposes volunteers to intimidation – which we regularly encounter – and can even endanger Internet users who contribute to the encyclopedia; - The threat of disclosure of personal information is likely to intimidate and cause self-censorship of other volunteers on the articles that this journalist from *Le Point* has targeted, first and foremost the article "*Le Point <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>*", but also on other articles previously called into question by Erwan Seznec ("Eugénie Bastié <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A9nie_Basti%C3%A9>", "Sylvie Brunel <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Brunel>", etc.); - They circumvent Wikipedia's editorial processes, which allow anyone to participate in developing consensus on the writing of articles and to resolve editorial disagreements, which are part of the normal functioning of the encyclopedia. For the record, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia with a horizontal, non-profit operation. It is based on five founding principles <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars>, including the encyclopedic aim, neutral of point of view (which consists of mentioning points of view according to their place in the field of knowledge, that is to say, quality sources) and respect for rules of etiquette. Decisions are made by consensus. Volunteer contributors, with varied profiles and political opinions, mostly intervene under pseudonyms, in accordance with what the platform recommends <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Nom_d%27utilisateur#Vrai_nom_ou_pseudonyme_?> to avoid harassment (they are not anonymous and can be identified by the courts upon request to the host). The encyclopedia is not perfect — for example, discussions regularly animate the community on how to improve biographies of living people <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons> and the treatment of recent events or media controversies. But its operation and its rules guarantee its independence from all powers. *We, volunteer contributors to Wikipedia, assure our attacked user of our support and denounce any attempt, from whatever source, to intimidate volunteer contributors to Wikipedia, including by threatening to contact their employer, and to disseminate personal information about them.*
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