Category: Technology Author : JR Posted: December 8, 2008
Tags : internet watch foundation, scorpions, virgin killer, wikipedia, wikipedia ban, wikipedia blacklist
The U.K.’s Internet watchdog organization has blacklisted a Wikipedia article for the first time.
The article is about the Scorpions’ 1976 album “Virgin Killer.” The album, as the Wikipedia article explains, features a very young-looking naked girl on its cover. A cracked glass effect covers her lower region, but her upper-half is completely exposed and visible. Some countries chose to replace it with an alternative image when the album came out, Wikipedia explains.
For some reason, all these years later, someone has complained to the British Internet Watch Foundation about the image — and the group has decided to censor it. The IWF says someone reported the Wikipedia page through a form on its Web site. A statement says:
“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. The IWF does not issue takedown notices to ISPs or hosting companies outside the UK, but 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.”
The vast majority of U.K.-based ISPs use the blacklist maintained by the IWF, which is a non-profit, non-governmental organization.
The Wikipedia article, fittingly enough, has already been updated with this development. The Wikimedia Foundation also released its own statement about the incident, noting that the IWF blacklisting has also prevented U.K. Internet users from being able to edit any Wikipedia articles.
“It is a huge problem,” the statement says. “There are tens of thousands of people in the UK who regularly edit Wikipedia: roughly one quarter of all edits to the English Wikipedia are made from inside the UK. The Wikimedia Foundation is dependent upon the contributions of volunteer editors in order to fulfill its educational mission. It cannot afford to have UK-based editors excluded from participation in the encyclopedia.”
As to the legality of the image, the Wikimedia Foundation says it has “no reason to believe the image has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world” and points to the fact that the image is also posted on pages within Amazon, where the album is available for purchase.
“We are frankly baffled as to why the IWF would choose to target Wikipedia — an encyclopedia, run by a charitable organization, which has been repeatedly gauged as equivalent in quality to conventional encyclopedias — for censorship. And we are particularly displeased that the IWF chose to censor not solely the image, but also the explanatory article text which described and contextualized the controversy surrounding the image, in a neutral and educational fashion,” the organization says.
Dec 9, 2008
there is a phrase saying 'potentially illegal indecent image'. it would be much better to achieve a result of recognizing the content as illegal one and then banning it with absolutely no doubt. rather than call it potentially illegal without proving it.
i don't like the image either, but i like the words 'legal, law'. this decision should be made based on legal bases, not on someone's 'logical' judgements
Dec 10, 2008
The image does look like it was made by and for paedophiles, though not being a paedophile I am maybe being naive. But, I still don't understand why this somehow translates into me being unable to edit an article today about say wild flowers, on Wikipedia.
I am prepared to put up with being unable to edit Wikipedia if this does help reduce the abuse of children in Britain but I can't help but being a little cynical. I just don't instinctively trust the British establishment because we are not a democracy; too many unaccountable people make decisions for us.
For example, we don't elect the House of Lords which can and frequently does veto the elected House of Commons will. Our elected governments representative, the Prime Minister, has to report, like a juvenile, who can’t be trusted to act responsibly, to an unelected head of state, the Queen, once a week to justify himself, which is absolutely appalling.
Moreover, historically, constitutional Monarchies have had a nasty habit of turning into Fascist states. Italy, a constitutional monarchy, was the world’s first fascist state and all fascist states thereafter evolved from constitutional monarchies, with the exception of Germany, perhaps. Though, Hitler’s first attempt to seize power was in collusion and conspiracy with Ludendorff and other supports of the old Kaiser.
So, I am bit cynical, almost paranoid, when the British establishment attempts to push censorship in a new direction and I start wondering what is really going on. Is something else being covered up, apart from the obscene image of an underage child being exploited, sexually? Are the lively and very open debates, which often follow edits, particularly inside articles describing historical events, seen as peculiarly dangerous by the British establishment?
What is really going on here? Is Wikipedia deliberately blocking UK ISP's from editing, is the filter thing just an excuse for a spat or are the British internet providers really behind the censoring of edits? A Virgin Media spokesman recently said, access could possibly be enabled if Wikipedia changed its system configuration. Adding, although the proxy server transmits the actual IP addresses of users, Wikipedia's systems appear to be looking at the proxy server's IP address only and denying editing access based on that. Is that a lie?