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Wikipedia administrators found on 5 December 2008 that six British ISPs were filtering the access to their site, after Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) had put the online encyclopedia on a child-pornography blacklist for its article on Virgin Killer, the record album of the German band the Scorpions.

The action was taken following a report occurred on 4 December through IWF's online reporting mechanism on the article which presents the album and its original cover depicting a naked prepubescent girl. The cover was banned in many countries and replaced by another cover when the album was issued in 1976.

IWF stated that "As with all potentially illegal online child sexual abuse reports we receive, the image was assessed according to current UK legislation and in accordance with 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, hosted outside the UK. As such, in accordance with IWF procedures, the specific webpage was added to the IWF list. This list is provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to help protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to potentially illegal indecent images of children."

David Gerard, unofficial spokesman for Wikipedia UK, argued that ISPs were blocking not only the image but the associated text of the article. "Part of the problem lies in the fact that the IWF have not just blocked the offending image, but have blocked the accompanying text as well. We cannot be certain, but we suspect that had they stuck to their remit of focussing on pictures, the problem might not have arisen."

In some cases, UK users could not edit Wikipedia pages, in others it seems they could not view it at all. Moreover, because the six ISPs are routing Wikipedia traffic through transparent proxies, an enormous amount of what would appear to be Wikipedia editors seem to come from the same IP range. A single IP may identify all Virgin Media users, which means that if Wikipedia admins decided to ban one Virgin Media customer for inappropriate edits, they might ban all Virgin Media customers. One of the messages received by UK users read: "Wikipedia has been added to an Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well."

Although legally correct in classifying the cover album image as illegal in UK under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, as the image does not link to sites with similar material and is not hosted on such a site, IWF, which compiles its blacklist manually, could have applied the Notice and Take-down procedure in order not to disrupt other legitimate uses of Wikimedia. On the other hand, Wikipedia's editors, although not contacted or notified by IWF or the ISPs, have considered the issue of taking the image down but decided against it, considering this measure a form of censorship.

On 9 December, IWF Board announced that after considering the context of the case and the fact that the image had existed for some time already and it was also widely available, it had decided to remove this webpage from its blacklist. Moreover: "Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures."

The blacklist has also had results outside UK. In Finland, Teliasonera, a large ISP, also censored the Wikipedia article. The reason given out was a configuration error causing the ISP to use the IWF censorship list in addition to the police provided list.

Richard Clayton from EDRi-member FIPR-UK looked in depth on the technical aspects of the censoring of Wikipedia to underline the fact that the IWF chose to filter text pages on Wikipedia rather than just the images they were concerned or that different capitalisations of URLs, the different blocking technologies, and the different implementation timescales led to considerable confusion as to who blocked what and when.

"Some of these matters could be described as "human error" and might be done better in any re-run of these events with any of the other questionable images hosted on Wikipedia (and many other mainstream sites). However, most of the differences in the effectiveness of the attempted censorship stem directly from diverse blocking system designs - and we can expect to see them recur in future incidents. The bottom line is that these blocking systems are fragile, easy to evade (even unintentionally), and little more than a fig leaf to save the IWF's blushes in being so ineffective at getting child abuse image websites removed in a timely manner" concludes Richard.

Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover (7.12.2008)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/07/brit_isps_censor_wikipedia/

IWF statement regarding Wikipedia webpage (9.12.2008)
http://iwf.org.uk/media/news.251.htm

UK ISPS lock out Wikipedia in filtering error (7.12.2008)
http://www.iptegrity.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&am...

Finnish internet censorship expanding: Wikipedia article censored (7.12.2008)
http://blog.fealdia.org/2008/12/07/finnish-internet-censorship-expandi...

Technical aspects of the censoring of Wikipedia (11.12.2008)
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2008/12/11/technical-aspects-of-the...