Censorship in the United Kingdom disenfranchises tens of thousands of Wikipedia editors
Wikimedia Foundation opposes action by internet watchdog group to blacklist encyclopedia article
San Francisco CA, December 7, 2008: As of December 6, 2008, most Internet users in the United Kingdom no longer have full access to Wikipedia. Due to censorship by the UK self-regulatory agency the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), most UK residents can no longer edit the volunteer-written encyclopedia, nor can they access an article in it describing a 32-year-old album by German rock group the Scorpions. Wikipedia visitors in the UK have also reported performance issues accessing the site.
The IWF has confirmed to the Wikimedia Foundation that it has added Wikipedia to its blacklist, which also had the unintended consequence of rendering UK-based internet users unable to edit the encyclopedia, and possibly harming the site's performance inside the UK.
The IWF says its blacklist is used, on a voluntary basis, by 95% of UK-based residential Internet Service Providers. A statement on the IWF website says it added the Wikipedia article to the blacklist after the article was reported by a user, and an IWF assessment found it to be “potentially illegal.”
“We have no reason to believe the article, or the image contained in the article, has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world,” said the Wikimedia Foundation's General Counsel, Mike Godwin. “We believe it's worth noting that the image is currently visible on Amazon, where the album can be freely purchased by UK residents. It is available on thousands of websites that are accessible to the UK public.”
“The IWF didn't just block the image; it blocked access to the article itself, which discusses the image in a neutral, encyclopedic fashion,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The IWF says its goal is to protect UK citizens, but I can't see how this action helps to achieve that – and meanwhile, it deprives UK internet users of the ability to access information which should be freely available to everyone. I urge the IWF to remove Wikipedia from its blacklist.”
The Wikimedia Foundation is proud of the work done by its volunteer editors, who have created an encyclopedia which external studies repeatedly validate as equal or better in quality compared with conventional encyclopedias. Wikipedia's editors take care to ensure the quality of the content of the encyclopedia, and to safeguard the core community values of freedom, independence, and neutrality.
The Wikimedia Foundation will continue its discussions with IWF to resolve this matter.
Questions and answers about this issue can be found here.
About us
About the Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit, charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of its wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most-visited websites. For a full list of projects, visit Our projects. All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by volunteers using the MediaWiki software. Their content may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license. The goal of Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in history, is to create free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Anyone with Internet access is free to contribute by writing new articles and editing existing articles. Wikipedia was ranked the fourth most visited website on the internet in November 2008 according to comScore. Wikipedia started in January 2001, and currently offers over eleven million articles in over 260 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in English, with more than 2.6 million articles; followed by the German and French editions, each of which contain more than six hundred thousand articles. Nine other language editions contain 200,000+ articles, and more than 150 other languages contain 1,000+ articles. Wikipedia is entirely created and maintained by a community of active volunteers.
Press inquiries
On December 7, ''Wikinews'' first reported that some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the United Kingdom, were filtering access to an image and an article on the popular, free online encyclopedia ''Wikipedia'', amid allegations that they contain child pornography. The filter was brought into play by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which issued a statement regarding the filtering shortly after ''Wikinews'' published the article. Wikimedia, the host of ''Wikinews'' and ''Wikipedia'' oppose the IWF's actions, also issuing a statement.

"A Wikipedia web page, was reported through the IWF’s online reporting mechanism in December 2008. As with all child sexual abuse reports received by our Hotline analysts, the image was assessed according to the UK Sentencing Guidelines Council (page 109). The content was considered to be a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18, but hosted outside the UK," said the IWF in a statement posted on their website.
Users attempting to access the page on the ''Virgin Killer'' album, or the image itself, have been subjected to it not loading, 404 pages, or messages explaining the block.

The image and article in question is that of the 1976 album ''Virgin Killer'', a studio album by the Scorpions, a German rock band.  The controversy began after the image of the album's original cover, which depicted a naked prepubescent girl, was reported to the IWF in early December. ''Wikinews'' first discovered the controversial image in May 2008 after there were several attempts to delete it on ''Wikipedia''. The image had been blocked because the IWF considered it to be "potentially illegal". As a result, the IWF have contacted authorities in the United States and in the UK.

The measures applied redirect ''Wikipedia''-bound traffic from a significant portion of the UK's Internet population through a small number of servers which can log and filter the content that is available to the end user. A serious side-effect of this is the inability of administrators on Wikimedia sites to block vandals and other troublemakers without potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of innocent contributors who are working on the sites in good faith.

Contributors or individuals attempting to view an affected image or file, depending on their ISP, may get a warning saying, "we have blocked this page because, according to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), it contains indecent images of children or pointers to them; you could be breaking UK law if you viewed the page." Other ISPs provide blank pages, 404 errors, or other means of blocking the content.
1976 album cover for the Scorpions which previously appeared on Amazon.com, and many other sites. 
Wikimedia was not informed that the image would be blacklisted because the IWF "does not issue takedown notices to ISPs or hosting companies outside the UK". The servers for Wikimedia projects are located in Florida in the U.S., and according to Jay Walsh, the head of communications for Wikimedia, the Foundation "opposes" the action taken by the IWF.

"The IWF has confirmed to the Wikimedia Foundation that it has added Wikipedia to its
blacklist, which also had the unintended consequence of rendering UK-based internet users
unable to edit the encyclopedia," said Walsh.

"We did advise one of our partner Hotlines abroad and our law enforcement partner agency of our assessment. The specific URL (individual webpage) was then added to the list provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child," added the statement by the IWF.

"We have no reason to believe the article, or the image contained in the article, has been
held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world. We believe it's worth noting that the image is currently visible on Amazon, where the album can be freely purchased by UK residents. It
is available on thousands of websites that are accessible to the UK public," said Mike Godwin, legal counsel for Wikimedia. The cover has since been removed from ''Amazon.com''.

Wikimedia projects such as ''Wikinews'' state in their policies that they are "not censored". Wikimedia will continue discussions with the IWF in hopes of resolving the issue.