Prepare yourself for a bad-tempered row over UK attempts to censor Wikipedia. The reason? Virgin Killer – a 1970s album from German heavy metal band, Scorpions. The result: Wikipedia is now shut to (anonymous) edits for large swathes of the British population.
The album cover features a picture of a prepubescent girl and was banned in many countries – though you can still buy it (with the original cover art) on amazon.co.uk. The Wikipedia page discussing the album, and the controversy around its cover, has now been blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation, a quasi-official body that censors “images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere in the world”.
IWF’s blacklisting has led to six ISPs blocking the page – something they’ve done by filtering all traffic through two proxy servers (if this reminds you of the Great Firewall of China – it should).
Unfortunately, the result of this is to make it seem as if vast swathes of the British population are visiting Wikipedia from the same IP address. That makes stopping abusive edits more or less impossible – so Wikipedia has had to ban all these users from anonymous editing:
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, the method they are using makes it impossible for us to differentiate between legitimate users and those abusing the site. As a result, we have been forced to block several IP addresses from editing Wikipedia.
Reports that all 1970s heavy metal are to be removed from the Internet on the grounds of musical taste, meanwhile, have been denied by the Internet Watch Foundation…
