Feeding the Machines, Draining the Commons
The Wikimedia Foundation and Asian News International lawsuit continues to play out in court, but the latest verdict is clear: Wikipedia must remove the "defamatory" description of ANI.
🔔 Wiki Briefing
Split Decision in Wikipedia vs. ANI Court Fight
For several months, the Wikimedia Foundation has been engaged in a legal battle with Indian-based news organization Asian News International (ANI). ANI sued the Foundation for what it said were defamatory claims in its Wikipedia article. The Foundation was forced to hand over the personal information of the editors who wrote the offending content and, for a spell, the case quieted down. Finally, after months of waiting, the Indian courts made back-to-back rulings—where each side can claim victory.
ANI's success came first. The Delhi High Court ruled that Wikipedia had to take down content described as "defamatory" on the Asian News International article, prevent users from adding back the content, and remove the article's "protected" status, once again opening it up to editing by anyone. The Foundation immediately appealed and got a partial win, but the judges said the Foundation still had to remove the defamatory content within 36 hours.
The court's latest ruling isn't the first time they have ordered the Foundation to take down information from the online encyclopedia. In October 2024, the courts ordered that the article about this very court case, titled "Asian News International v. Wikimedia Foundation" be removed because it interfered with court proceedings. The WMF appealed and had been waiting for its day in front of the Indian Supreme Court.
That day came at the same time that the defamation proceedings were underway.
On Wednesday, April 9, the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court because it wasn't obvious on first impression that the Wikipedia article was made to be in contempt of the court. That paved the way for the ANI vs. WMF article to return to the encyclopedia, but as of Monday, April 14, it still had not been re-published.
With each side racking up wins, it's clear that the courts are not immediately siding with their local news organization and that the Foundation is being given consideration in its arguments. It remains to be seen how much longer that will last.
📰 In the News
AI bots: A boon or a burden?
When President Jimmy Carter died last year, his Wikipedia article predictably surged in pageviews. Users also flocked to Wikimedia Commons to watch the former president's 1980 debate against Ronald Reagan, maxing out several of its internet connections. When engineers went to reroute traffic, they uncovered a novel problem: AI bots were eating at the baseline bandwidth.
Generative artificial intelligence companies have always needed new, quality sources of information to improve their models. It only makes sense that the developers of these tools would turn to the largest collection of open, free knowledge in history. But resources are finite, and each bot eats at those resources far more than their human counterparts.
The information on Wikipedia, along with its sister sites like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, is housed on servers run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Like all technology, these servers have a limited bandwidth. Since January 2024, these AI tools have been straining the system. How much? The Foundation says scrapers have increased bandwidth demands by 50 percent since January 2024 for downloading multimedia content, the most expensive kind of content to serve. Bots represent 35 percent of page views but account for 65 percent of this resource-consuming traffic.
Wikipedia isn't the only site to have this problem; Reddit has already had to block automatic scrapers. The question isn't so much on whether this problem can be solved, but the best way to do it. In true Wikipedia fashion, the Foundation is crowdsourcing input from its volunteer editors.
📚 Research Report
AI bots scraping Wikipedia come into use
We now know that AI bots are disproportionately using Wikipedia's bandwidth but how else is it using this information? As it turns out, SEO marketing platform SE Rankings has found that Wikipedia does in fact rank high on Google's AI Overviews. So high, in fact, that it is beating out sites like Reddit, despite the popular social media forum having a deal with Google for training AI models.
In 2024, Wikipedia was #3 on the top 10 linked domains, with LinkedIn at #5 and Quora in the top position. Since then, the report has been updated with Wikipedia and LinkedIn switching spots and Quora and Reddit dropping out of the top 10 all together.
🧩 Wikipedia Facts
Wikipedia has a specific style guide for writing about figure skating that is more than 13,000 words long. If printed, it would be 34 pages.
💡 Tips & Tricks
Netflix subscription getting too expensive? Wikimedia Commons isn't just for photos, you know. If a film is in the public domain, there’s a good chance you can watch it there. From comedy to horror to foreign language, the media repository has much to explore in a neatly laid out category of films in the public domain.
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