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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

If you are subject to a lawsuit and the judge issues a gag order restricting you (and the party suing you) from making public statements about the court case until it is resolved, that wouldn't be weird no?

If that were to happen, and you were to then publish an article about this exact court case on your blog, you'd be found in contempt of court and rightly so. Even if the blog article only summarizes and links to other content, like the news articles. You were restricted from speaking about the case, and you broke that restriction. What part of "don't make public statements about this case" didn't you understand?

That's what's going on here. Wikipedia is, essentially, Wikimedia Foundation's blog. This article about the court case is, legally speaking, Wikimedia speaking about an ongoing case they are involved with. If the court issues a gag order, they have to respect it. This is subjudice, not censorship.

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Wikimedia Foundation is not the author of Wikipedia - individual editors are. WMF isn't making any statements - editors are when they write articles. It's censoring speech of editors not subject to the jurisdiction of the court, and threatening legal penalties against the English language Wikipedia.

The fact that this hasn't happened before should tell everyone that this is not business as usual. No other government in the world has caused WMF to respond in such a way, which leads me to believe that this case is not as obvious as you say.

Also, due to license terms of Wikipedia, by deleting the page, individually and collectively, Wikipedia editors are being denied their rights as authors. This may be a copyright violation in India, in the jurisdiction of the editors, in the legal jurisdiction in which WMF/Wikipedia are incorporated in, and/or all of the above, that is to say, worldwide.

I disagree with this. The buck stops with WMF. They write the rules and they are the ultimate arbiters of edit wars. They are the ones ultimately responsible for granting and taking away privileges from users.

If something is written on wikipedia it's because they are okay with it. The political slant of wikipedia is an expression of WMF views.

Also an important point is that wikipedia aims to create a work that is a coherent whole spoken with one voice rather than say hosting a discussion where writing is clearly attributed to its respective authors.

Wikipedia endeavors to have neutral point of view, and there are nearly 900 “admin” editors. This is not an easy consensus, and I’m not sure that such sweeping statements applied collectively to MWF or Wikipedia are expressing to me what you might seek to convey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians

That's not how legal responsibility is assigned in nearly all jurisdictions. It doesn't matter who wrote some speech. It matters who _hosted_ the speech. I'm not a solicitor in India so I can't say for certain how things are handled here, but this is not surprising for any commonwealth jurisdiction.

It matters who hosted the speech, but also what jurisdiction the host is in. India cannot hope to enforce this outside India.

I suspect WMF complied in protest in order to draw attention to the censorious nature of the rulings so far.

Seems like it's working well for them.

Wikipedia explicitly considers it censorship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#India

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

According to Jimbo Wales, they complied in order to not "lose the possibility to appeal". Apparently, "the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step." WMF lawyers are doing "everything [they] can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today."