Wikipedia parent responds ANI defamation suit, says content by volunteer editors

Wikimedia Foundation responds to ANI lawsuit over Wikipedia page, highlighting clash between volunteer editing and Indian regulations.

The Wikimedia Foundation has responded to the lawsuit this week by Asian News International (ANI), the newswire agency that supplies video and text feeds to several news organisations in India. ANI had sued the Wikipedia parent demanding ₹2 crore for what it said were defamatory allegations in the introduction section of its page on the online encyclopaedia — such as its alleged pro-government bias and tendency to cite misinformation. 

“It has come to our attention via press reports that the Hon’ble Delhi High Court has issued a summons to the Wikimedia Foundation regarding a defamation case filed by ANI against the Foundation,” the foundation said in a statement. “As a technology host, the Wikimedia Foundation generally does not add, edit or determine content published on Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s content is determined by its global community of volunteer editors (also known as the ‘Wikimedia Community’) who compile and share information on notable subjects.”

The foundation said it hadn’t yet received a summons in the case, and would determine next steps when it does. The case pits, potentially for the first time in such a significant way, Wikipedia’s volunteer-centric editorial norms against Indian regulations like the IT Rules, 2021, which require all loosely defined internet “intermediaries” to take action against content online if it is, among other things, defamatory, and a court or government order is issued against them.

One of the main constraints in this case is that Wikipedia globally abstains from the kind of article-level control over its content that such regulations demand of online platforms, deferring instead to its vast network of volunteer editors. Having content run by volunteers opens the encyclopaedia up to such legal claims, while also risking vandalism: in 2022, for instance, then Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar called out the platform for derogatory remarks added to the cricketer Arshdeep Singh’s page. 

That vandalism was quickly fixed. The contention this time around is this: the very safeguards Wikipedia volunteers have adopted to safeguard against vandalism may, in part, be keeping ANI’s Wikipedia page from changing. That page has been set to “extended confirmed protection, which allows edit access only to volunteer user accounts that meet the criteria of being at least 30 days old and having 500 edits,” the Wikimedia Foundation said.

That drastically diminishes the pool of individuals around the world who have the ability — or interest — to “improve” ANI’s Wikipedia page. “Experienced users can continue to improve the Wikipedia article about ANI in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines on reliability, verifiability, neutrality and conflict of interest editing,” the foundation spokesperson said.

In 2019, in response to a draft version of the IT Rules, the foundation said in a filing with the government that the regulation’s “proposed changes may have serious impact on Wikipedia’s open editing model, create a significant financial burden for nonprofit technology organizations and have the potential to limit free expression rights for internet users across the country”.