DBT Bureau
Bengaluru, 5 September
The Delhi High Court made some strong observations against Wikipedia for not complying with the court’s order on disclosing information about people who made edits on ANI’s Wikipedia page, reports said.
Issuing a contempt order, the court threatened to shut down Wikipedia’s operations in India if it continued to defy the court’s orders.
During the hearing, Justice Navin Chawla said, “I will impose contempt… It is not a question of Defendant No 1 [Wikipedia] not being an entity in India. We will close your business transactions here. We will ask the government to block Wikipedia… You’ve made this argument before. If you don’t want to comply with Indian regulations, then don’t operate in India.” This was report by the Business Standard newspaper.
The current case is related to certain edits on ANI’s Wikipedia page, that had termed the agency as propaganda tool of the incumbent government. This had prompted the news agency to sue the company for defamation.
The court had previously ordered Wikipedia to reveal information about the three people responsible for these edits. However, Wikipedia had not provided this information. The court also ordered a Wikipedia representative to appear in person on October 25 for the next hearing.
Wikipedia has become the world’s largest reference website, in which anyone can edit its content in most cases. It features more than sixty-three million articles in over 300 languages.
