The city attorney of Durham, North Carolina attempted to coax the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to reveal the identities of three editors and to prohibit the placement of certain verifiable and truthful content on Wikipedia pages of city officials, Indy Week and The News and Observer report.

A letter, dated June 29, outlined three complaints about content on Wikipedia. Two of the complaints pertained to coverage of a council member’s alleged attempted extortion of a developer, while the third related to an image depicting the signature of mayor of Durham. The letter requested that the Wikimedia foundation remove the image and bar users from uploading it on Wikimedia projects, and requested the names and identities of the various editors who added the text and/or image content to Wikipedia.

Recent months have been a tumultuous time for Durham’s seven-member city council. In March, Elaine M. O’Neal, the mayor of Durham, publicly read an allegation that a Durham city council member (subsequently identified as Monique Holsey-Hyman) had extorted a developer for campaign contributions. The aftermath of the meeting was testy, with the public able to hear shouting between officials, despite them being out of public view. An eyewitness interviewed by Indy Week alleged that Durham council member DeDreana Freeman had attempted to strike Durham Mayor-pro tempore and council member Mark-Anthony Middleton during the shouting session, but instead struck O’Neal once and punched the head of fellow Durham council member Leonardo Williams twice before Williams subdued her. In the aftermath of these incidents, O’Neal announced that she would not seek re-election as Mayor and a state investigation was opened into the extortion allegation (Holsey-Hyman denies the alleged extortion attempt and a separate allegation that she ordered city employees to perform campaign work on her behalf).

For making edits to the Wikipedia entries about certain figures implicated in this scandal, the letter requested the identities of Mako001 and Willthacheerleader18. The entries contained unflattering information about the public officials at the time of the letter’s sending, but the entries were well-sourced; Indy Week reports that the entries’ descriptions of the scandal were written “without any apparent factual error and with links to news articles as references”.

Several figures have publicly expressed concerns about the sending of the letter. Barry Saunders, a member of the editorial board of The News and Observer, wrote that, “[u]nless the Wikipedia posts were egregiously wrong—and there’s no evidence that they were—the three Durham officials should have taken a page, when it came to criticism, from the title of the 1970s hit by the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive: let it ride… Few voters, though, will forgive attempts to silence critics”.

Duke University law professor Stuart Benjamin was taken aback by the letter. He told The News and Observer, “I understand why public officials do not want unflattering information published about them, but it is deeply troubling that any public official tried to unmask someone who posted this accurate information.”

David Larson, opinion editor of The Carolina Journal, concurs. “[T]his attempt to intimidate anonymous people online for daring to discuss real but unflattering details of your political service is the stuff of dysfunctional regimes”, he wrote.

The WMF, for its part, told Indy Week that it is “strongly committed to protecting the privacy of editors and users on Wikimedia projects”.

The letter, signed by city attorney Kimberly Rehberg, also states that she had removed the image of the signature from the Wikipedia article about Elaine M. O’Neal on June 28. This checks out; that article was edited on that day by a user named Kimlynn69, and Kimlynn69 wrote a message to Johnson524 that identified herself