No, India didn’t ‘summon’ Wikipedia over Arshdeep edits. It asked for information within 24 hours

Contrary to an Economic Times report early on Monday, India’s ministry of electronics and information technology has not “summoned” any Wikipedia executives over vandalised pages.

Instead, the ministry has asked the Wikimedia Foundation to provide information on action taken on vandalised Wikipedia pages belonging to Indian cricketer Arshdeep Singh and an Indian footballer with the same name. This information must be provided within 24 hours, Newslaundry has learned.

The email was sent by Deepak Goel, group coordinator of the ministry’s cyber laws division, to Jacob Rogers, legal director (governance and risk), and Kabir Singh Choudhary, senior counsel (governance and risk) at 6.52 pm IST on Monday – seven hours after Economic Times published its story. Newslaundry had also published an update based on ET’s report; this has since been corrected.

The email was sent under sections 3(1)(b) and 3(1)(d) of the Information Technology Rules, 2021 which forbid intermediaries from hosting, storing or publishing any information that is illegal, or threatens the sovereignty and integrity of India, amongst other things.

What happened?

The aftermath of India’s loss to Pakistan on Sunday took an ugly turn as Twitter users started accusing 23-year-old Indian bowler Arshdeep Singh – who dropped a catch in the penultimate over – of being a Khalistani and anti-national.

Things became worse at 12.28 am, an hour after the match had ended, when a user vandalised Singh’s Wikipedia page and changed his name to “MAJOR Arshdeep Singh LANGRA [lame]”. The edit described Singh as “an Khalistani cricketer” who “was named in khalistan squad”. His “national side” was edited to “Khalistan Punjab”.

Details of this editor, identified only by their IP address (39.41.171.125), suggest this user originated in Pakistan. The address’s WHOIS entry locates the node in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, whose internet connection is provided by Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited, a private Pakistani telecom. The service WhatIsMyIPAddress located the user in the Pakistani city of Murree, about 90 km away from Rawalpindi. The ISP is still listed as PTCL.

It is understood that in its email sent in the evening, the IT ministry cited this tweet by Vijay Patel, founder of OnlyFact, a right-wing fact-checking website. It is this tweet that came to the attention of ministry secretary Alkesh Kumar Sharma in the morning.

After ET’s report on Monday, even the minister of state for electronics and information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, tweeted about it, saying no intermediary operating in India “can permit this type of misinformation”.

Later in the day, it is understood that the ministry also discovered that the Wikipedia page of another Arshdeep Singh, a goalkeeper for Goa, had been vandalised at 2.28 pm IST on Monday. Born in 1997, the footballer’s place of birth was edited to “Chandigarh, Khalistan”.

But the user who made these edits – with IP address 2409:4055:2dcf:68ac:edc9:f4e1:9269:2c87 – is based out of India and their ISP is Reliance Jio. Interestingly, this user’s location details are not mentioned by the ministry in its email to the Wikimedia Foundation. The same user also vandalised the Wikipedia page of another Indian footballer named Arshdeep Singh (born 1994) and changed his place of birth to “Chandigarh, Khalistan” as well. However, the IT ministry did not include any references to the latter in its email.

The same user also went after the Wikipedia page of Harbhajan Singh, a former cricketer and current Rajya Sabha MP, changing his place of birth to “Jalandhar, Punjab, Khalistan”. This vandal edit wasn’t mentioned in the email either.

All four pages – of cricketer Arshdeep, both footballers and Harbhajan Singh – have now been fixed. Interestingly, 16 revisions on the page of cricketer Arshdeep Singh were removed from the public archives at 8.08 pm IST and are instead hidden (available here). The reason for removal from public archives is cited as “Grossly insulting, degrading, or offensive material that has little to no encyclopedic or project value” and for violating Wikipedia’s policy on biographies of living people.

How trustworthy is the location information?

Rohini Lakshané, who has been a volunteer Wikipedia editor for more than 14 years, helped us understand some of these details better.

Vandal edits, she explained, are “disruptive” and “not supported by the necessary citations and do not contain verified information”. In this case, within half an hour (12:53 am), all the “vandal edits” made to Arshdeep Singh’s page were corrected by another user based out of the US. The page has now been fully corrected.

Is it possible for the IP address or the location to have been spoofed?

“In the case of unregistered accounts, the IP addresses of the editors are logged,” she said. ”The location is not spoofed; the IP address may or may not be.”

Lakshané added, “IP addresses of countless open or anonymising proxies, zombie proxies, VPNs, colocation web hosts and other web hosts are banned from editing English Wikipedia ‘to prevent abuse’. So, in case this is a spoofed IP, TOR node or VPN, it's something that hasn't yet been indexed by English Wikipedia's blockers, and therefore went undetected.”

On asking whether there was any probability of this particular “vandal” evading Wikipedia English’s blockers, she said that she could not indicate that but that “the IP address block lists on Wikipedia are updated frequently”.

So, what’s the problem?

Simply put, it is whether or not the Wikimedia Foundation can be held responsible for content added to its online encyclopaedia by its volunteers. For Rajeev Chandrasekhar, it appears the foundation needs to take some semblance of responsibility, or at least urgently act.

In 2007, a French court had ruled that the Wikimedia Foundation was not responsible for content added to its Wikipedia pages by users.

This is a larger problem that plagues not just India, but the entire world. Can an intermediary – that is, an entity on the internet which does not create content – be held responsible for content that its users upload to it? The short answer is no, which is why intermediaries have something called the safe harbour, by which they cannot be held legally liable for content uploaded by their users. The user uploading problematic content is held responsible. The exception to this is if the intermediary is informed of illegal content by a competent authority.

Things turned messy last year when the Indian government mandated that all social media intermediaries (a special class of intermediaries) with more than 50 lakh users in India must also appoint a chief compliance officer, a nodal contact person and a resident grievance officer – all resident in India – to essentially liaise with the Indian government.

In the case of Wikipedia, it is understood that for the IT ministry, it is not a social media intermediary and thus has a much lower burden of compliance.

Earlier this year, the ministry also proposed amending the Information Technology Rules, 2021. Amendments proposed include instituting a grievance appellate committee but its composition has not been defined.

What does the Wikimedia Foundation say?

In a statement to Newslaundry, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation acknowledged that the ministry had made the foundation aware of the vandalism and that the article related to cricketer Arshdeep Singh is now “semi-protected”, that is, edits can only be made by trusted users.

As such, Wikipedia has no employees or executives anywhere in the world. Its parent organisation, Wikimedia Foundation, does. The foundation’s headquarters are in the United States where all its executives reside. It is Wikipedia volunteers that are spread across the world. Different volunteer chapters are recognised by the foundation in different countries. Wikimedia India was approved as a chapter in 2010 but was derecognised in September 2019.

It is understood that the foundation does not set the editorial policies for any of its knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and others.

In December 2019, before the IT Rules were notified, the foundation had in fact written in a letter to the then IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad that the then proposed rules would have a “negative impact on access to knowledge and participation for Indians online”. It had said at that time that shorter response times for removals would require using automated systems which would “interfere with people’s ability to collaborate in real time”.

It had also said that for a non-profit, local incorporation requirements and investments in new employees and technology would be “an unrealistic burden for a global non-profit”.

Here is the foundation’s statement in full to Newslaundry.

“The Wikimedia Foundation, the US-based non-profit that operates Wikipedia has been made aware by the Indian Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology of the vandalism that took place on the Wikipedia page of Indian cricketer, Arshdeep Singh. The Wikipedia page of the cricketer was vandalized with false claims on September 4, however the wrongful edits were removed within minutes by Wikipedia's volunteer community. Right now, the article on English Wikipedia is semi-protected (which allows edits by only trusted users) to restrict further vandalism on the page.

“Wikipedia is a volunteer-led platform with more than 295,000 contributors from all over the world, including over 60,000 volunteers in India. Wikimedia Foundation generally does not set editorial policy on Wikipedia. That is, we don’t write, edit, or determine what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained. Editorial policy is instead determined by the global volunteers who edit Wikipedia every month. Over the years, this community of volunteers has created various policies and guidelines to determine what content is included on Wikipedia and how. Unlike for profit technology companies, Wikipedia is governed by principles of reliability, neutrality and transparency– the platform model, which does not include ads or tracking of users, is intended to de-incentivize the spread of viral content and misinformation. Information found on Wikipedia must be sourced and cited from reliable news or other secondary sources of information.

“Vandalism does occur on Wikipedia from time to time, as can occur in any open, online platform. It is a violation of the trust and good faith of our editors and readers, and runs contrary to the values on which Wikipedia is based. The majority of vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted by bots or editors within minutes, as was done in this recent case.”