The proposed changes to India’s intermediary liability changes might “have serious impact on Wikipedia’s open editing model, create a significant financial burden for nonprofit technology organisations and have the potential to limit free expression rights for internet users across the country,” the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit group that operates Wikipedia and a number of other projects, said in a letter to IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. The letter, written by the Foundation’s General Counsel Amanda Keton, also urged the government to make the latest proposed changes to the intermediary rules public so that concerned stakeholders could have a chance to participate in a “robust and informed debate about how the internet should be governed in India”. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had told the Supreme Court that it would notify the Intermediary Guidelines (Amendment) Rules 2018 by January 15. Automated content takedown 'antithetical' to Wikipedia's global perspective: Since “someone in New Delhi could collaborate on the same English Wikipedia article alongside an editor in Berlin,” it becomes “impossible to restrict changes inside a Wikipedia article from being visible in one country and not another,” Keton argued. Wikipedia's collaborative system will be disrupted: Obligatory filtering systems will severely disrupt Wikipedia’s collaborative system and short response times for content removal would interfere with people’s ability to collaborate in real time “on Wiki”. “Wikipedia is structured by individual languages, not geographic markets. People work together in real-time to write articles about topics of interest on Wikipedia," the letter added. “Fulfilling mandatory content…
