In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages. At the time of the suit’s filing, the Wikipedia article about ANI said the news agency had “been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions”. The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing “false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency’s reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill”.
On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated “If you don’t like India, please don’t work in India… We will ask government to block your site”. In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources. Justice Manmohan said “I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes.”
On 21 October, the Wikimedia Foundation suspended access to the article for Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation due to an order from the court.
Seems like a good opportunity to remind folks about the Kiwix project, which allows you to download local private copies of select information such as Wikipedia. It was originally created to provide offline access to content for countries that were otherwise blocked, but events like this have sparked some recent discussion about archiving older files to preserve history.