Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-04-09/In the media
Indian judges demand removal of content critical of Asian News International
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Delhi High Court orders removal of material on Asian News International from Wikipedia
A new Delhi High Court ruling in the ongoing case between the Wikimedia Foundation and Asian News International (ANI) required the WMF to remove "defamatory" content concerning the Indian press agency from its Wikipedia page.
Media coverage of the ruling included articles from Deccan Herald ("Delhi High Court orders Wikipedia to remove allegedly defamatory description of ANI from its page"); Bar and Bench ("Delhi High Court orders Wikipedia to takedown defamatory edits on ANI page"); The Indian Express ("In a first, Delhi High Court directs Wikipedia to remove ‘defamatory’ content on news agency ANI"); and Reuters ("Wikimedia must remove India content deemed defamatory, court rules").
According to The Indian Express, it was "the first ruling by an Indian court in which Wikipedia has been directed to remove defamatory content". As of this issue's publication, Reuters, which owns 26 percent of ANI, but is not involved in the agency's operations, did not respond to a request for comment. On Monday, Reuters cited unnamed sources who stated that Wikipedia filed an appeal, and an Indian newspaper said that one High Court judge had recused himself from the case.
The Delhi High Court will continue to hear the case, in which ANI seeks damages of about 20 million rupees (roughly $240,000) and an apology from the Wikimedia Foundation; last December, a Judge hearing the WMF's appeal of a possible injunction in the case, said that he would read the sources used to reference the alleged defamation on the article for ANI – see related Signpost coverage at our December 2024 In the media report.
In January, the WMF took the case to a hearing at the Supreme Court of India, which reportedly expressed concern over the Delhi High Court's reasoning for the takedown order, with at least two judges noting that the case would have broad implications for press freedom – see related Signpost coverage at our March 2025 report.
You can also read the November 2024 In focus report for more context on the court case. – B and O
Take two and call me in the morning
"Wikipedia May Be the Antidote to Trumpism" (audio with transcript), according to WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show. Matt Katz interviews Margaret Talbot, of The New Yorker. Her article 'Elon Musk Also Has a Problem with Wikipedia' was reviewed in this column last month. Talbot glowingly explains the Wikipedia editing process. Then Katz lobs a softball "You did write ... that Wikipedia is in almost every aspect the inverse of Trumpism. ... Why do some people refer to the site as the last good place on the Internet, and why is it an inverse to Trumpism?" Talbot knocks it out of the park, listing transparency on the talk and history pages, clear "policies and practices", and "a real dedication to using reporting from reliable news sources." Later she praises the reliable sources/perennial sources page and contrasts the Wiki to Elon Musk's Dickipedia proposal and his stiff-arm salute. – S
French Wiki vs. Le Point dispute sparks media coverage frenzy
In the last few weeks, the current dispute between the French Wikipedia and French news magazine Le Point has been covered by several national media outlets: Le Monde has published a detailed article on the matter (behind pay-wall), as Le Parisien (with two different articles) and La Voix du Nord (at this link) have done.
The same story also drew attention from all over the political spectrum, including centre-right newspaper Le Figaro (at this link), right-wing magazine Marianne (which also addressed their own dispute with the Les sans pagEs project) and left-wing magazine Politis (at this link). Historian and professor Jean-Luc Chappey has also written an opinion article in defense of fr.wiki for Libération; the same side has been picked by Mathilde Panot, the current President of the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, in a YouTube video. And, of course, Le Point itself has published lots of op-eds and articles on the case involving one of their journalists.
Finally, Canadian French-language network Ici Radio-Canada also reported on the case (in audio format), as well as English-language portal Brussels Signal.
For more context on the case involving the French Wikipedia and Le Point, see the News and notes and Community view columns from the February 27 issue. – O
Wikipedia probably not among the victims of Google's "AI Overviews"
interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with themthat
[t]he now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers [above regular search results] — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet(not unlike media coverage of various previous algorithm updates in past decades). This conclusion was disputed by a Google spokesperson, who pointed out that website traffic can also change due to other reasons. In any case,
Google has said AI Overviews is driving more traffic to a diverse mix of publishers, but the company hasn’t provided data to back up that assertion. According to the data firm BrightEdge, the sites receiving the most referral traffic from AI Overviews are primarily big players, like TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, Mayo Clinic and Google’s own YouTube, rather than smaller publishers.
More specifically, the cited SEO firm, BrightEdge, reports that wikipedia.org is among the Domains [that] Are Sourced the Most
: It has about 11% "Share of Citations in AIO" (apparently meaning the percentage of all AI overviews sampled by BrightEdge that provided at least one Wikipedia page as a citation, possibly among other sources). Still, this is much lower than the top two domains, which belong to the NIH (ca. 31%) and the Mayo Clinic (ca. 28%) - BrightEdge notes that our data skew[s] to healthcare
.
On its blog, the firm had also published several somewhat breathless updates about month-to-month changes in the data, occasionally mentioning Wikipedia. During June 2024 (shortly after Google's general launch of the feature in the US), [c]itations for wikipedia.org declined 28% from the start to the end of the month [June 2024]. This may indicate a shift away from general knowledge sources towards more specialized, authoritative references [such as cdc.gov for medical content]
. A month later, BrightEdge reported that Wikipedia showed a slight decline of about 5% in daily search volume
from June to July.
Still, such fluctuations have to be weighed against the benefit of Wikipedia being linked in the AI Overviews at all (as opposed to the smaller websites in the Bloomberg article). Especially considering that according to BrightEdge, [t]he average AI Overview result has expanded to 1,000 pixels tall—a 50% increase since August 2024—pushing traditional organic results further down the page.
– H
In brief
- Feed me, I'm hungry: Wikipedia Built the Internet's Brain. Now Its Leaders Want Credit. The New York Observer talks to Wikimedia Foundation execs who say there's "rapacious" content scraping to feed AI training, and regurgitation of community generated content without attribution (their viewpoint is spelled out at this issue's Op-ed). See also these related articles: [1] [2] [3] [4]
- Accusation that Trump nominees were "trashed", "smeared": Washington Examiner and New York Post, both considered right of center, used a report from conservative watchdog Media Research Center to heap scorn on Wikipedia and its editors:
- "How biased Wikipedia trashed Trump’s nominees — after he named them" New York Post
- "Wikipedia posts updated to smear Patel, Hegseth, Gabbard: Watchdog", Washington Examiner.
- Controversial moratorium: Wikipedia Editors Place Moratorium on Controversial Sentence in Zionism Article from Jewish Journal; the author says his prior reporting "highlighted how the [now locked-in] sentence [in the lede of 'Zionism'] resulted from anti-Israel editors primarily citing anti-Zionist historians"
- Colorful globe: "Wikipedia for Palestine", cover story for print issue of March 21–27 Jewish Journal, replete with full page white-black-green-red banded puzzle globe.
- You ain't nobody until...: "How obscure is prospective Celtics buyer William Chisholm? He didn't have a Wikipedia page until Thursday." in the Boston Globe. (claim confirmed - article created 20 March 15:52 UTC)
- Deconstructing Wiki bias: Deconstructing Wikipedia: It’s biased, lopsided and partisan in India's Sunday Guardian accuses Wikipedia of serious structural bias in its articles about India. It's a step above the usual complaints seen in some newspapers which come down to something like "We disagree, so you must be biased." Here the author, a senior police official, identifies several areas of potential bias, e.g. Hindu traditions and religious practices, policies promoted by the current right-wing government as opposed to Western liberal policies, India's border disputes, caste systems, gender inequality, and cow protection laws. He makes a case that admins and arbs are mostly western and lack an understanding of Indian realities. He does not seem to understand what Indians can do to work better within Wikipedia's quality control systems. This is a good article to read first if editors want to address a long-standing problem, but it could be a long slog before both sides come together to work together to solve the problem. – S
- WikiAsteroids: The "game Asteroids [using] Wikipedia edits to drive the volume and size of the objects hurling towards your ship", via Nathan Yau's FlowingData blog
- Hour-long Zero Hour: Blaze Media TV show Zero Hour talks to Larry Sanger under the web title "Wikipedia scandal exposed: Big Tech manipulates what you see"
- Pravda Network: Russian disinformation in the so-called Pravda Network has been incorporated by Wikipedia, reports the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [5], citing Digital Forensic Research Lab report. Pravda Network was created for "LLM grooming", a disinformation attack against large language model AI.
- NOTCENSORED: Former Wikimedia Foundation CEO, and current NPR CEO Katherine Maher stated during testimony to United States House Oversight Committee that "Wikipedia never censored any information" during her tenure, during grilling on NPR's coverage of COVID, and other touchy subjects. According to Fox News, chairperson Greene rebutted the witness by "noting comments she [Maher] made when she was CEO of Wikipedia [sic] and accusing her of censoring information related to the COVID pandemic." The committee hearing was titled "Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable".
- Spring and Fall: Wikipedia now has a page on the "Balkan Spring", BGNES News Agency (bg:БГНЕС) reports. However, the article was deleted on 2 April, apparently without being archived.
- Don't promote paid editing like that, though!: Katie Whyatt recently wrote for The Athletic on how the opportunities for scouting in women's soccer are still limited outside of the top leagues. Among the interviewees for the article, there was Jamie Smith, the founder of independent scouting software InScout Network, which he described as "a portfolio online that you can share", or "almost a bit like looking on Wikipedia or Transfermarkt for players who haven't got the finances to have that or someone to update their Wikipedia."
- What's my page again?: Italian online newspaper Il Post is one of the media outlets that have reported on recent improvements to image generation and text rendering featured on ChatGPT's new default model, GPT-4o; among other examples, the article cited an instance where a user asked the chatbot to recreate a screenshot of the Wikipedia page for cats, filled with images and proper explanations for their vital systems. We're not quite sure what "animal rogans" means, but it seemingly worked, nonetheless.
- Purple people eaters?: The Wikimedians of Minnesota User Group disbanded in 2020, soon after its formation, due to COVID, but it has now made a comeback with an in-person meeting in Saint Paul on April 6, as reported by local news website Racket. If you think editing Minnesota-centered articles is all about Prince and purple people eaters, think again. You can argue about the spelling of Jucy Lucy, or edit war on the Dakota War of 1862 or other military articles. There's lots of room for articles on rural towns, trains, the Hmong, and probably a few grain silo historic sites. In other words, Wikipedia editing at its finest. If this doesn't grab you, just stop by the next user group meeting for some stuffed sausages and beer. Enjoy!
- Can we get a re-write, please?: 404 Media noted the creation of the article 2025 stock market crash (during the week we went to print with this edition of The Signpost), "arguably writing one of the first drafts of history".
- Why Do These Two People Represent All Humans On Wikipedia?: That's the question that IFLScience asked about the image illustrating the article Human. The answers are more subtle than one might guess, and of course imbued with deep Wiki-ness.
Discuss this story
The WMF blanked the article about the court case, upon the demand of the court, which felt that the Wikipedia article discussing the case could prejudice the case itself. Perhaps not an unreasonable request.
As for the case itself. The claimant presumably wants "disparaging" statements, such as this statement in the article lead, to be removed from the article. This is where issues of Freedom of the Press come into play.
Of course, views can vary about whether a statement is true fact, or blatant propaganda. My statement here is my own. This edit is not an endorsement of the WMF. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:20, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Portal Kombat
Isn't the section on the Trump nominees, by attacking living Wikipedians, a violation of WP:BLP?
There's no reason to think the statements about the editors are neutral, accurate, or unbiased. We're quoting attacks on Wikipedians, in Signpost voice. WE CANNOT DO THIS. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.9% of all FPs. 19:02, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]