The story so far: The news agency ANI sued Wikipedia parent Wikimedia Foundation last month for defamation, due to a description of the news agency as a propagator of government propaganda on the website. Last week, a Delhi High Court judge threatened to order the government to block Wikipedia if the Foundation didn’t provide details of the users who made these edits.

What does the page on ANI say?

When Wikipedia’s page for the news agency Asian News International started reflecting new reporting scrutinising the firm’s record in 2020, a back-and-forth edit war ensued among users — seasoned editors on one side, and largely new accounts that only edited the ANI page, according to public logs of changes made to the entry — for months. The agency, which largely syndicates video and text feeds from around the country to news channels and other outlets (including to The Hindu), was described as “running [a] pro India fake news network aimed at influencing European think tank [sic] against Pakistan,” a version of the article then read. Over time, this rough sentence in the page’s introduction was smoothed out, annotated, and crystallised into what it says today: that the agency is “accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions.” ANI found the description, along with a longer section detailing these descriptions, defamatory. They sued the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, in the Delhi High Court earlier this year, seeking ₹2 crore in damages.

In statements to The Hindu, the Wikimedia Foundation has stood by the ANI page, saying that the descriptions in that entry are borne out by reliable sources (which include The Diplomat, the EU DisinfoLab, and The Caravan magazine). Users who have made more than 300 edits and have an account that is at least a month old are free to “improve” the page, the Foundation said.

What has the Delhi High Court ordered in the case so far?

At the second hearing on August 20, Justice Navin Chawla ordered the company to serve three of its users with a summons to appear in the case, and provide “details” about these users. The demand appeared to be aimed at unmasking the individual editors who made these changes, something that the Foundation has historically not done outside the U.S. Even as the non-profit communicated with ANI’s lawyers shortly before the subsequent hearing on Thursday, the latter filed a contempt application. At the Thursday hearing, Mr. Chawla issued a verbal threat to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia if it did not comply. An “authorised representative” of the non-profit was directed to be personally present at the next hearing on October 25.

Does Wikipedia face lawsuits and censorship threats elsewhere?

Wikipedia has faced bans and lawsuits from around the world by individuals and organisations that have been aggrieved by descriptions of them. In Russia, Wikipedia editors have been targeted with arrests and intimidation since the beginning of that country’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2019, a German court ordered the Foundation to remove records of an older version of an article about academic Alex Waibel; in the U.S., the firm routinely faces lawsuits, and nearly all cases have either been withdrawn or found in the non-profit’s favour, due to the country’s ironclad protections for web platforms.

The encyclopedia allows nearly anyone to edit posts, even without being logged in. However, some posts on contentious topics are restricted (sometimes for a long duration) to registered users with a track record of making contributions that have been upheld by other users. Norms on the site are decided by the community, and may be enforced unevenly, with articles on less notable subjects suffering from issues like advertising-like language.

Does Wikipedia content have an ideological bias?

The current policies followed by Wikipedia users do not have an explicit ideological flavour. These include guidelines such as having a “neutral point of view,” only including “notable” information and having reliable sources decided by the community. However, the site is often accused of a progressive, liberal bias, something that a few studies have also attested to.

Conservative grievances with Wikipedia users’ editorial slant have invariably become part of the discourse around the ANI-Wikipedia case. OpIndia, a right wing news portal that has covered the ANI lawsuit closely, has accused Wikipedia editors of propagating liberal “propaganda” on the site; has previously revealed the identity of an individual editor who started and contributed to the entry on the 2020 Delhi riots; and has criticised the site’s description of the riots for allegedly downplaying attacks by Muslim rioters. The portal’s editor on Sunday vowed to put out a detailed “dossier” outlining these allegations. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have had a general prohibition on OpIndia articles since 2009, with the site being described by a Wikipedia policy page on reliable sources by/for editors as “considered generally unreliable due to its poor reputation for fact-checking and accuracy”.

Has Wikipedia faced criticism for content vandalism in India before?

Wikipedia has faced the Union government’s ire at least once in the past due to vandalism. The cricketer Arshdeep Singh’s page was briefly vandalised last year, and then-Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the vandalism was inconsistent with the government’s principles for the Indian internet. The site’s volunteers had quickly addressed the vandalism and restricted the page to experienced editors.

The site also suffers from a weakness under Indian law — unlike social media companies, it has no procedure in place to block access to articles after receiving a court order. In 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation termed a prior draft of the IT Rules, 2021, which enable such blocking orders, as having “the potential to limit free expression rights for internet users across the country”.

Can Wikipedia be blocked?

However, Wikipedia may not be completely immune from arm-twisting or blocking. China, for instance, has had the site blocked for years. While Russia has not blocked the site, it has arrested volunteer editors of Russian-language Wikipedia, and told search engines to mark the site as a violator of Russian laws. Since Wikipedia content is licenced under what is called Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence 4.0, its pages can be legally mirrored to a “fork” setup that can edit and censor its content as per government demands or individual biases. Ruwiki is an example of such a fork, which complies with Russian authorities’ narratives on the Russia–Ukraine war.