Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia

On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux shattered-glass effect obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under English law which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed.

The URL to the image's description page, which depicts the cover art, was also blacklisted; however thumbnails and the image itself remained accessible. The album cover had been deemed controversial at the time of its release,^[1] and was replaced in some markets with an alternate cover image featuring a photo of the band members.^[1] The IWF described the image as "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18".^[2] Wikipedia's policies state that it does not censor content "that some readers consider objectionable or offensive, even exceedingly so", although it does remove content that is "obviously inappropriate", violates other Wikipedia policies, or is illegal in the United States.^[3]

As well as the direct consequence of censoring the article and image for UK-based readers of the English Wikipedia through the affected ISPs (a censoring that could be circumvented),^[4] and that the album cover was being made available unfiltered on other major sites including Amazon.co.uk^[2] (from which it was later removed), and available for sale in the UK,^[5] the action also had some indirect effects on Wikipedia, namely temporarily preventing all editors using said ISPs in the UK from contributing to any page of the encyclopedia,^[6] and preventing anonymous edits from these ISPs while the URL remained on the blacklist. This was described by the IWF as unintended "collateral damage".^[7] This was due to the proxies used to access Wikipedia, as Wikipedia implements a blocking policy whereby contributors can be blocked if they vandalise the encyclopedia. Therefore, all vandalism coming from one ISP would be directed through one proxy—hence one IP—and all of the ISP's customers using that proxy would be barred from editing.

After invoking its appeals procedure and reviewing the situation, the IWF reversed their blacklisting of the page on 9 December 2008,^[8][9] and announced that they would not blacklist other copies of the image hosted outside the UK.^[10]