UK IPS’s filtering Wikipedia

This story has been brought up over the last few days. A lot of UK ISP’s have been restricting access to a Wikipedia page in a bid to stop child pornography. This isn’t that controversial as filtering child pornography is not a problem at all, I think 99.99% of the world wants child pornography off the internet, let alone other illegal forms of porn.

But the problem with this is they have restricted access to a specific Wikipedia article of album cover by “the scorpions”. The album cover has a naked girl (early teens I would guess). In the US it is considered art, but in the UK it is considered child porn.

The restriction appears to only be on a few ISPs and returns a 404 page not found error. I have been able to access the page and grab a screenshot of what it should look like (for the curious users that cannot see it). The image links to a larger image obviously this is down to your discretion as to whether you view the full screenshot.

A large proportion of users that are currently being denied access to the page by their ISP are infact blocking them form editing any article on the site. Therefore defeating the object of a wiki. The following quote is from Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation

It appears that there’s a large number of editors – I can’t say all – who appear to have access issues.

The IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) has said as many as 95% of British users would now be unable to access the page. Of course if you just want access to the cover you can just do a Google Image Search and see the results.

The whole point in censorship is to stop people accessing the content, but surely the number of people vising the page has increased by a large amount. I really find this story facinating and have received lots of feedback from Twitter. Please contribute your thoughts in the comments below. For a more detailed view of the “Great firewall of britain” check out Boing Boing

Whilst writing this article my access to the page was restricted. I got the screenshot before the page was blocked.

So far the following UK ISP’s are confirmed as blocking the page:

• BT
• Orange/wanadoo
• O2 (only confirmed by iPhone users on 3G/GPRS)
• Virgin Media
• TalkTalk

Update: The IWF have now taken the page off their blacklist. Read the article.

Sources: BBC, Buzz Out Loud, Twitter

5 Comments to UK IPS’s filtering Wikipedia

1. 

   I decided to do a search of Google images to see just how pointless this ruling is and my suspicion was proven correct. I read somewhere that Amazon UK still showed the album cover, but when I checked that, I found “no image available”.

   The IWF may have just got a load more impressionable people interested in looking at this kind of pictures as a result, which shows how action without thought can have serious consequences. If they want to find it, they’re not likely to search Wikipedia anyway!

   I am surprised is that it is legal in America considering how repressed America is over the slightest “wardrobe malfunction”!
Ian on December 9th, 2008
2. 

   I agree 100% that this image should be banned, but the wiki article itself should not. As the image has a clear name, surely the ISP’s could have just blocked the image, or even wiki itself removing it. Interestingly I have just signed up for a wiki account, and now I have access to the page including the image!!
glyn_e on December 9th, 2008
3. 

   UPDATE: Having viewed the site once, I am now being blocked, so are the ISP’s recording IP addresses of those accessing this page? My ISP is BT Internet.
glyn_e on December 9th, 2008
4. 

   I had the same problem. I had the site up when I started writing. Then after a few refreshes it was blocked.
Ollie Parsley on December 9th, 2008

5. [...] blocking UK internet users with 6 of the top ISP’s we now have a response from them. See the previous article about the page being [...]
IWF backs down on blocking Wikipedia page | TechJuicer on December 10th, 2008

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