If you’ve been following the Indian box office lately, you’ve likely seen the frenzy around Dhurandhar: The Revenge. The movie, also called Dhurandhar 2 by some, came out last week and since then has set the box office on fire. But it has set fire in one more place and that is Wikipedia. On the Wikipedia page of Dhurandhar: The Revenge there is a flame war going on between the top Wikipedia editors on how to describe the movie. While some want to call the movie the way films are described, which in this case happens to be action-thriller, some editors want the word “propaganda” added to it.
At one point the debate between those deeming the movie propaganda and those trying to shield Dhurandhar from such a label became so intense that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made a rare intervention. And for now due to his intervention, at least at the moment, Wikipedia doesn’t define the movie as a propaganda. Or rather it doesn’t use WikiVoice — the assertion made directly by Wikipedia — to deem the movie as such. Though, the page does talk about how some other people — and not WikiVoice — are calling the movie a propaganda.
So, is Dhurandhar a propaganda or not?
Well, there is a lot of drama and twists and turns in the story. For a brief period, Wikipedia described Dhurandhar: The Revenge as a “propaganda film”. That label didn’t come out of nowhere. Some critics and commentators accused the film of pushing a particular political narrative. Using that context, some Wikipedia editors managed to push a line that opened the Wiki article about the movie using word propaganda. The line read, “Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a 2026 action-thriller propaganda film.”
But as it happens on Wikipedia, particularly on hotly contested pages, this was changed immediately and the world propaganda was removed. Soon, the edits and counter edits started a Wikipedia war. Different editors kept changing the film’s introduction to reflect their interpretation, with the word “propaganda” becoming the bone of contention.
Eventually, after multiple rounds of back-and-forth, Wikipedia dropped the “propaganda” tag and reverted to a more neutral description saying “ Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a 2026 Indian Hindi-language spy action-thriller film written and directed by Aditya Dhar.”.
But that wasn’t the end of the debate. With both sides continuing to push their views, Wikipedia locked the page under what’s called “extended confirmed protection”. In simple terms, this means only experienced, vetted editors on the platform can make changes.
Why did Jimmy Wales step in?
Sometimes, though rarely, edit wars on Wikipedia catch the attention of its founder Jimmy Wales. In the case of Dhurandhar it did. But the intervention from Wales was not about judging the film itself, but about protecting Wikipedia’s core principle of neutrality, or Neutral Point of View (NPOV). In discussions among editors around the Dhurandhar: The Revenge page, Wales made it clear that Wikipedia cannot take sides, especially on issues where reliable sources disagree.
He pushed back against attempts to label the film as “propaganda” in the opening line, arguing that doing so would present a contested claim as an established fact. “Strong no — it is deeply inappropriate to take one side of a debate in the first sentence of an article by saying something in WikiVoice which is contested,” Wales wrote in the Talk Page of the movie. “Avoid stating seriously contested assertions as facts.”
Essentially, Wales was not trying to pass a judgement on the dispute. He was more concerned with WikiVoice, which he thought should not deem the movie a propaganda even if the Wikipedia page can have a discussion on the perceived propaganda of the film.
This he even explained while talking to Wiki editors. “I think that the level of mention of propaganda in the sourcing warrants inclusion in the lede, but obviously not in WikiVoice which should be reserved almost exclusively throughout all of Wikipedia for cases where we have widespread consensus in the community, which we clearly do not have in this case,” he said.
