“If you are just quoting news or citing it, and if it has already been reported on other platforms, that also gets counted as news and current affairs?” asked Kabir Darshan Singh, Lead Counsel at Wikipedia, while seeking clarifications on the recent draft amendments to IT Rules. He also expressed Wikimedia’s concerns and said, “We are going to be raising our objections and concerns to the relevant stakeholders here” at the Software Freedom Law Center’s (SFLC.in) online discussion on draft IT Rules amendments. You can watch the recorded version of the discussion on their YouTube channel.
Wikipedia’s counsel, Singh, was referring to the MeitY’s latest draft amendments to IT rules, which aim to bring the user-generated content related to “news and current affairs” under the purview of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s (MIB) code of ethics framework, which right now covers only publishers of news and current affairs content and online curated content operating in India. MeitY extended the deadline to submit public feedback to April 29, 2026. You can send your comments to: [email protected]
What happens if the government considers contributors as publishers? “Over time, we are going to see that there would be less participation by users in editing an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, contributing free knowledge overall,” he said. He added that the draft amendments to the IT rules can have “chilling effects on the Wikimedia community”.
Singh also said he is particularly concerned that the proposed amendment to Rule 8 blurs the distinction between news and current affairs publishers, users posting such content, and the platforms hosting them.
Public participation in discourse is being penalised: “For instance, say the Queen dies; that article gets updated within a second or so. Now, what we are really doing is that we are no longer just regulating the platforms here. We are essentially reprimanding participation in the public discourse itself. What really constitutes news and current affairs? The encyclopedic articles, per se, are knowledge-based articles. They are going to be updated as and when a new verifiable quote or a new fact comes in.”
“Complying with the orders with short times like three hours is just not feasible,” Singh said. “We do definitely scrutinise the data request and any takedown request that comes to us, and we want to ensure that it is legitimate, whether it is terrorist content, harmful content, CSAM, or anything else, so that we are going to take it down. But it takes time for us to verify it. Is it verifiable and cited by a source? So then, whether the order is legitimate or not, a one-hour timeline or a three-hour timeline is not feasible for a small organisation like the Wikimedia Foundation. So overall, I think there would be a net loss to the free knowledge community, and I hope common sense prevails.”
Fewer contributors on Wikipedia due to extra scrutiny can impact AI responses: “Wikipedia is a database on which all your AI datasets are actually training right now. All AI systems essentially are using Wikipedia data to provide you with the knowledge pipelines. So, in effect, I would say that if there are going to be chilling effects on the sources themselves, even if people are moving to different sources of consuming knowledge, we will see a decay in the kind of information that is available, the authentic information that is out there.”
How is Wikipedia different from social media platforms? “The effort that goes into contributing to an encyclopedia is far greater compared to writing a 120-character opinionated tweet,” said Singh.
“On Wikipedia, you have to find a source, tweet and write about it and then ensure that the source is accurate and cited properly on Wikipedia. And the good thing about these projects is that these articles are dynamic. They are updated in real time. The community is checking each other again and again, ensuring that the information is up-to-date,” he added.
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