The Caravan

The EDIT WARS

“IT MIGHT BE AWKWARD, but please don’t scroll past this.” In July this year, the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation launched a donation campaign in India. A banner pinned at the top of every Wikipedia article noted that fewer than two percent of users made donations and that, if those who saw the banner would contribute ₹ 150 each, the online encyclopedia “could keep thriving for years.”

For an open-source collaborative website that does not carry any advertising, the appeal was business as usual. The Wikimedia Foundation relies on contributions to maintain the website and its servers, as well as to pay its employees. According to the foundation’s financial statement for 2018–19, it raised nearly $111 million in donations and contributions, accounting for over ninety percent of its total revenue in the fiscal year. The campaign, however, was met with stiff opposition from right-wing figures in India. Accusing the website of being “full of editors who are biased, anti-Hindu and anti-India,” the columnist Shefali Vaidya tweeted to her half a million followers, “#StopFundingHate do NOT donate to @Wikipedia or @PetaIndia. They use YOUR money against you—to peddle Hindu hatred.”

The Hindu Right has long been harbouring frustrations against Wikipedia. Once perceived as an apolitical platform, the encyclopedia has now turned into a new front in India’s culture wars.

“Wikipedia has published many questionable statements about Hindu writers, leaders, causes and historical issues,” David Frawley, the founder of the American Institute of Vedic Studies, tweeted, adding that it was “not an unbiased forum. Hindus should protest against its anti-Hindu views.” The filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri tweeted that “Wikipedia has #UrbanNaxals editors.” The author Rajiv Malhotra, who claimed to have first criticised Wikipedia during the 1990s—he clarified, after people made fun of him by pointing out the encyclopedia was founded in 2001, that he meant its predecessors in the collaborative-encyclopedia space—argued that it stood for the gamification, rather than the democratisation, of knowledge. “Those with better gaming skills overrule others with lower privilege level,” he tweeted, comparing Wikipedia’s hierarchy of editors to a caste system.

Over two decades of its existence, Wikipedia has been seen in India as a relatively uncontroversial source of information, providing a surface-level introduction to just about everything. The Hindu Right, however, has long been harbouring frustrations against the encyclopedia. In the past year, those frustrations found a voice. Once perceived as an apolitical platform, Wikipedia has now turned into a new front in India’s culture wars.

The story begins in the national capital, on 24 February. What Wikipedia would later call the 2020 Delhi riots were only just starting. Television screens played videos of wanton violence. Arnab Goswami was angry. “If they wanted a headline on the day that Trump comes to India,” the anchor shouted at the start of the primetime debate that night on the pro-government news channel Republic, “if they wanted a headline to feed to some global lobby, they should not have done it at the cost of human lives.”

Peaceful protests against the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act had been taking place in Delhi for over two months. Goswami was alleging, without providing any evidence, that anti-CAA protesters had instigated the violence in search of publicity. He did not mention that, a day before the violence started, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra had made an incendiary speech threatening protesters who were blocking a street in northeastern Delhi. “Till the US president is in India, we are leaving the area peacefully,” Mishra had said. “After that we won’t listen to you”—the police—“if the roads are not vacated.”

On the morning of 25 February, with the violence showing no signs of abating, a Wikipedia editor with the username DBigXRay created an entry for the “North East Delhi Riots.” For DBigXRay, this was a routine practice. Since 2012, the editor has created dozens of articles on Indian subjects, including the Patna railway station

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