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2. The Plaintiff is India's leading multimedia news agency providing syndicated news feed with over one hundred bureaus across the globe under the name "Asian News International" and "ANI". The Plaintiff has been managing and operating this business for over five decades, since the year 1971.

3. The Defendant No. 1 is a non-profit and charitable organisation incorporated under the laws of the United States of America. It is stated that the Defendant No. 1 has been set up to provide the necessary infrastructure to make knowledge available to the public free of charge. Defendant No. 1 hosts the English Wikipedia (hereinafter referred to as "Platform"), stated to be a free encyclopedia that currently contains over 6.8 million articles online in the English language.

8. The learned Counsel for the Plaintiff supplements his contentions by stating that the test of defamation is that the impugned statements must bring down the reputation of the Plaintiff in the eyes of a reasonable member of the public. It is further stated that the Defendant No. 1 holds itself to be an encyclopedia and a repository of facts which attracts around 979 million unique device visitors each month. It is stated that a reasonable member of the public will perceive the impugned statements as a verifiable fact appearing in an encyclopedia.

Further the intermediary shall preserve such information and associated records for at least ninety days for investigation purposes.""

16. Defendant No.1, therefore, cannot completely wash its hands of the contents of the article on the ground that it is only an intermediary and cannot be held responsible for the statement that is published on its platform. Defendant No.1 professes itself to be an encyclopedia and people at large have a tendency to accept the statements made on the web pages of Defendant No.1 as gospel truth. The responsibility, therefore, of Defendant No.1 is higher. This Court is not dwelling further on this aspect while considering the present application.

Signing Date:03.04.2025 21:20:01

22. After going through the policy of the Defendant No. 1 regarding neutral point of view which states that any encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view, without any editorial bias. On perusal of the page pertaining to the Plaintiff, it appears that the statements on the page pertaining to the Plaintiff are all sourced from articles which are nothing but editorials and opinionated pages. Defendant No.1 which is following the policy to avoid stating opinions as facts and also professing it to be an encyclopedia has to also see as to whether the opinions are actually based on the source articles or not so that neutral policy of Defendant No.1 is not violated.