The Supreme Court, in quashing the Delhi High Court’s orders against Wikimedia to take down a Wikipedia page on the basis of a defamation case filed by the news agency, Asian News International (ANI), has set right an error by the High Court. A High Court judgment, passed on April 2, 2025, allowed the taking down of the Wikipedia page by saying that the statements were defamatory and were not a verbatim reproduction of the text in the references that it quoted; that the references were themselves “editorials” or “opinionated articles” and that being an encyclopaedia, Wikipedia carried a “higher responsibility”. The reasoning is problematic as the references are based on long form reporting and quotes from independent investigators, and are not “opinions” or “editorials” as the High Court made them out to be. The Court has clearly differed with the High Court’s reasoning by observing that the takedown order was based on too wide a prayer, and noted that the directions to remove all false, misleading and defamatory content were too broadly worded. The Bench has now directed the news agency to make a fresh plea to the High Court pointing out specific portions to be removed from the webpage. The fact that Wikipedia is an Internet intermediary which enjoys safe harbour provisions as the content creation and moderation are handled by users of its site should suggest that any wide-ranging takedown order could punish the very model on which the encyclopaedia operates.
Wikipedia is a community-driven encyclopaedia freely available on the Internet and is maintained by volunteers across the world. Even if the quality of articles is not uniform, their editors generally include experts and Wikipedia allows users to edit the content provided they stick to site guidelines. Disputes on content leading to “editing wars” are generally resolved by discussions on the page and measures such as placing the page on “extended confirmed protection” or “full protection”, allowing only “extended confirmed users” for the former and administrators for the latter to make changes. These users are not selected by Wikimedia but elected by community members based on their prior editing activity and reputation. These processes have ensured a significant degree of reliability on the encyclopaedia, even as it has become a repository of more than 62.95 million articles in over 350 languages. In asking for the takedown of articles by interpreting critical information as defamation and by even threatening penal action against Wikipedia, judicial actions could unwittingly lead to the stifling of open discussion of entities on the encyclopaedia, thereby acting against the interest of the free flow of information.
Published – April 19, 2025 12:20 am IST
