Content moderation on Wikipedia
- Recently, India summoned Wikipedia officials in response to a cricketer’s Wikipedia page being edited with misleading information that stated he was a “khalistani” when he dropped a catch in India’s match against Pakistan.
Wikipedia
- Started in 2001
- Described as a “multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system”.
- All its content is user generated.
- Meaning anyone can contribute to its pool of knowledge by making edits to existing pages for update and can even add new pages.
| Advantages | Concerns |
|---|---|
| * Allows democratisation of knowledge | * Reliability of information that it hosts. |
| * Ensures unhindered access to edit |
Content moderation
| Restrictive editing | * Allows certain “protections” to be accorded to particular pages depending on the vulnerability of the page to vandalism, disruption and abuse. |
| * Aim: | |
| * To increase its reliability | |
| * To prevent vandalism and disruptive edits | |
| Temporary/ permanent protection to prevent edits | * As edit rights are widespread, there have been instances of “content disputes” and “edit warring”. |
| * In this case, editors disagree with each other’s content. | |
| * Leads to edit warring where editors repeatedly override each other’s contribution in a specific page. | |
| Community review process | * Individuals gain exercise attendant rights through a community review process. |
| * The more the trust they gain from the Wikipedia community, the greater is their degree of editorial responsibility. |
Controlling the content
| Wikipedia’s content servers controlled by Wikimedia Foundation | Control of Wikimedia Foundation on the “system administrators” |
|---|---|
| * They do not have ownership of the user generated content | * System administrators exercise considerable power. |
| * They control the user activity information generated on the servers | * They can take decisions of blocking users or reversing edits. |
Responsibility of Wikimedia Foundation
- Under most laws regulating online content, intermediaries are endowed with immunity from the user generated content they host.
- Intermediaries are afforded this immunity because:
- it is impossible to monitor the sheer volume of content generated
- Being personally responsible for user content would inundate them in legal battles.
- It would make operations at that scale infeasible.
Indian government actions
- Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000
- For intermediaries to claim the “safe harbour” of not being responsible for the content they host, they must abide by due diligence requirements under the Act and its Rules.
- Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021
- Certain categories of information that should not be allowed by an intermediary to be hosted or uploaded on its platform.