New Delhi:

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has appealed to the public to stop donating to the internet ‘encyclopaedia’ Wikipedia for allegedly letting itself be misused as a platform “controlled by far-Left activists.” This is not the first time the Tesla and SpaceX founder has attacked Wikipedia for allegedly running Left narratives.

Mr Musk’s latest post on X, the microblogging platform owned by him, referred to a report by the US-based news website Pirate Wires that alleged “a coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favourable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack.”

Mr Musk, who is also a strong supporter of Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donal Trump, in the post on X said, “Wikipedia is controlled by far-Left activists. People should stop donating to them.”

Wikipedia is controlled by far-left activists.

People should stop donating to them. https://t.co/Cjq2diadFY

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 25, 2024

In the report, Pirate Wires said six weeks after October 7 (Hamas’ terror attack on Israel), one of the Wikipedia editors successfully removed the mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which called for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the entry on Hamas.

The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials, the US news website that reports at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture said.

In India too, Wikipedia has been accused of being misused by ‘super editors’ – longtime users who can lock topics on the website to prevent more edits – to run certain narratives.

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Asian News International (ANI), one of the largest news agencies in South Asia, last month filed a Rs 2 crore defamation case against Wikipedia’s parent foundation for allowing certain malicious edits to a page with information about the news agency.

The Delhi High Court then issued contempt notice to Wikipedia over withholding information about edits to an entry on ANI, after the news agency said Wikipedia did not reveal details about three accounts that made the edits. Wikipedia eventually removed the entry over which ANI filed the defamation case.

The Delhi High Court on October 25 raised concerns over Wikipedia’s open-edit platform model, with Justice Subramonium Prasad calling it “dangerous” due to its public editing access, legal news website Bar and Bench reported.

Wikipedia has also become a narrative battleground over the Manipur crisis, with allegations that far-Left editors attribute their content only to sources created and influenced directly or indirectly by them. Malicious edits made by ‘super editors’ and locked by them on Wikipedia are seen as a huge problem.

New Delhi:

The Supreme Court has ordered Wikipedia to remove from its website the name and photo of the trainee doctor who was raped and murdered at a government hospital in Kolkata last month. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, identifies the doctor in a page dedicated to the incident that has shaken the country. Indian laws don’t permit the identification of rape victims.

“The identity of the victim should not be revealed in any way. Wikipedia should immediately remove the victim’s photo and any content revealing her identity,” a bench led by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud said.

The Chief Justice said the provisions of the Indian law is very clear that the identity of the victim in rape and murder cases cannot be revealed and Wikipedia must remove such references.

The doctor’s photo had been shared online and also featured at several protests across Bengal demanding justice in the incident.

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The court had ordered the removal of the name, photos and videos of the trainee doctor from social media earlier as well. The CJI had then said the disclosure of the identity of a victim of sexual assault is a violation of its order passed in the Nipun Saxena case.

In its 2018 order in the Nipun Saxena case, the Supreme Court had held, “No person can print or publish in print, electronic, social media, etc. the name of the victim or even in a remote manner disclose any facts which can lead to the victim being identified and which should make her identity known to the public at large.”

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The trainee doctor was found dead with severe injury marks on her body on August 9 morning at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, sparking strikes by doctors and protests across the country. A civic volunteer named Sanjoy Roy, the college’s then principal Sandip Ghosh, and a cop have been arrested.

The CBI, which took over the case from Kolkata Police soon after, has alleged attempts to destroy evidence by the principal and the police officer. The Mamata Banerjee government has also agreed to remove the Kolkata Police chief and two health department officials, which had been among the key demands by the protesting junior doctors.

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”.

The case is listed in the Delhi High Court for its next hearing on August 20.