A monthslong legal battle between online encyclopedia Wikipedia’s parent company and India’s largest newswire service took a turn this week that has raised concerns about free access to credible online information in the country.
In July, Asian News International (ANI), which calls itself South Asia’s leading multimedia news agency, filed a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court against the U.S.-based Wikimedia Foundation over a Wikipedia page that labeled ANI a mouthpiece of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The foundation runs Wikipedia. The content on Wikipedia is managed by volunteers, and it allows all users free editing access to its pages.
During a hearing in the $237,000 [approx.] defamation lawsuit on October 28, Wikimedia relented to the High Court’s demand that Wikipedia reveal identifying information of the online users involved in editing the ANI page. In August, the court had threatened to halt the operation of the widely used website in India if it did not comply.
Indian tech journalist and digital rights activist Nikhil Pahwa said that if the precedent set by the ANI lawsuit against Wikimedia holds, it will make editors across Wikipedia vulnerable to defamation cases from any political actor who has an issue with their Wikipedia page.
“This means that anyone who edits a Wikipedia page is potentially susceptible to identification because all one has to do is file a case. In the case of politicians especially, the edits will be fraught with risk. This will mean that Wikipedia editors will hesitate when editing pages pertaining to powerful people, and this has a chilling effect on speech,” Pahwa told VOA.
ANI, which also accused Wikipedia of spreading information from “fake news websites,” had demanded in the lawsuit that the website’s page on the newswire service be taken down.
Wikimedia initially argued that the pages on ANI were entirely written by volunteers who simply made use of an online platform provided by Wikipedia. But on October 16, the court ordered Wikimedia to take down a page concerning ANI, saying that its existence was “interfering” with the court proceedings.
In an unprecedented move, Wikipedia removed the page from its platform on October 21.
On October 25, the Delhi High Court expressed surprise at the open-access editing function of Wikipedia, calling it a “dangerous tool.” Justice Subramonium Prasad, during a hearing on the case, asked: “Anybody can edit a page on Wikipedia? What kind of page is this if it is open to anybody [to edit]?”
A history of censorship
Wikipedia has faced bans or censorship intermittently in more than a dozen countries. The site has also faced lawsuits filed by individuals as well as organizations across borders.
China banned the Chinese language version of Wikipedia in 2015. Four years later, it blocked all language editions of the free, community-edited encyclopedia in the country.
Pakistan blocked the website for three days last year for hosting allegedly blasphemous content. Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif later ordered the restoration of the site, noting that the consequences of the blanket ban outweighed its benefits.
In 2023, a court in Russia imposed a fine worth $20,350 on Wikimedia for not deleting what it claimed was “banned content” regarding the Russian military. The fine was for the failure to take down a page that contained “classified military information” about Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, among other content on its location and equipment.
Global popularity
Wikipedia insists that despite being a community-driven platform, it has a robust fact-checking system. Wikipedia also maintains the anonymity of its volunteers who edit and verify information from different sources.
Wikipedia, available in many languages and with more than 350 editions, is consistently one of the most visited websites in the world and is used by millions of people for a variety of purposes.
New Delhi-based lawyer Ujjaini Chatterji said that Wikipedia is a very useful first step for any research.
“It is especially helpful because they have a lot of other links within the footnotes which direct us to other credible articles, journals, academic literature, media coverage, databases and more, in order to build on our research further,” she said.
“This free source encyclopedia is particularly a useful starting point to understanding concepts in a simplified manner. Like many others in India, I have used Wikipedia, both as a student and a professional,” she added.
Indian residents visit Wikipedia more than 750 million times per month, making it the online encyclopedia’s fifth-largest user base in the world. The site operates in 23 Indian languages besides English. The outcome of the lawsuit, which is already resolved at this point, may affect hundreds of thousands of Indians in the future.
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