BRUSSELS: Wikipedia fought back against Europe’s “right to be forgotten” by listing the online encyclopaedia’s articles removed from search results, snubbing a court ruling that allows people to stop personal information appearing under Internet searches.

The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs the free online encyclopaedia, said on Wednesday that it had received notices from search engines affecting more than 50 links to Wikipedia pages.

In its first public statement against the ruling from Europe’s top court in May confirming that people can stop irrelevant or outdated personal information from appearing under searches for their name, the foundation said it would publish each notice for the removal of a link to a Wikipedia page.

“Accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no real proof, no judicial review, and no appeals process,” wrote Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation on its blog.

“The result is an Internet riddled with memory holes — places where inconvenient information simply disappears.”

The “right to be forgotten” has divided experts and pitted privacy campaigners against defenders of free speech, who argue that the ruling will lead to people whitewashing their past.