Wikipedia is facing increasing regulatory pressure in India as local authorities question whether the platform should continue to enjoy legal protection as a neutral intermediary rather than being defined as a publisher.
India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notice to Wikipedia on Tuesday asking about the intermediary status of the encyclopedia given to technology platforms in India. The department has raised concerns about tight planning controls and ongoing complaints about bias and unfairness in the area.
The notice follows a contentious case in the Delhi High Court, where judges described Wikipedia’s open editing feature as “dangerous” and threatened to suspend its operations in India. The court is hearing a defamation lawsuit filed by news agency Asian News International, seeking to identify Wikipedia contributors who allegedly described the organization as a “propaganda tool” of the Indian government.
Judge Navin Chawla dismissed Wikipedia’s request for more time to respond due to its lack of physical presence in India, warning of initiating contempt proceedings against the platform if it fails to comply with orders to disclose user information. “If you don’t want to obey Indian laws, don’t work in India,” the judge said.
Wikipedia has insisted that its volunteer editors must adhere to their established policies on content that can be verified and legal guidelines, although this defense has come under increasing scrutiny from Indian authorities concerned about the platform’s content-censoring practices.
Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama and a prominent voice on technology policy, questioned the legal basis for the government’s move, saying that India’s IT law determines the status of a platform based on the number of employees rather than the number of employees.
“You can be a platform with one user/editor or a billion,” he wrote on X.
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