Brits censor Wikipedia page carrying nude picture of girl child

" title="Brits censor Wikipedia page carrying nude picture of girl child" />

London, December 8: Internet Service Providers in the United Kingdom have censored a Wikipedia page owing to concerns of child pornography. The banned page contained a picture of a nude girl on an album cover of the 70s heavy metal band, Scorpions. The picture, described as "potentially illegal indecent image of a child under 18," was judged to be pornographic.

The cover photo has been generating controversies, ever since the album ‘Virgin Killer’ released in 1976. It was withdrawn from a number of countries for the same reason back then.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has a list of banned websites, which is widely used by British Internet service providers to filter out illegal content. Almost 95 percent of the ISPs in Britain use IWF's blacklist and the addition of the site in there, made it inaccessible to a vast majority of the people residing in Britain.

This time, some users were annoyed by IWF’s move as they said it was not appropriate for a self-appointed body to decide on its own that something was illegal. They suggested that the offensive image could have been censored alone, and the text accompanying it be left as such.

‘Discussion’ section of the article features a notice that says the album cover will not be removed and that users who find it indecent should configure their browser to block it.

IWF’s move has also apparently blocked thousands of Wikipedia users across Britain from editing any of the articles on the site, according to Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the encyclopedia.

"It appears that there's a large number of editors — I can't say all — who appear to have access issues," he said.

The ban on a certain page should not affect the other functions in the site but Sarah Robertson, the spokeswoman for IWF could not explain reports that other parts of the site were difficult to navigate, after the ban. "There shouldn't have been any collateral damage," she said.

Probably the ISPs had to route Wikipedia traffic through a proxy server, causing the editing problems for users.