Wikipedia is one of the most popular encyclopedias available today. The reason for which many use the seemingly endless source of knowledge is that Wikipedia – unlike Britannica, for instance – is a multilingual encyclopedia, supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that makes Wikipedia free to use. So far, Wikipedia features, over 10 million articles, which are the written result of a collaborative effort of millions of volunteers from around the world. Wikipedia was launched at the beginning of 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, and it currently hold the title of both the largest and the most popular general reference work on the Internet. There has been of course, the inevitable criticism regarding some of Wikipedia’s policies, such as allowing virtually anyone to edit the contents or favoring consensus over credentials, which in turn have sparked conflicts regarding Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy.

Recently, Wikipedia has been at the center of a censorship scandal in the United Kingdom. It seems that the United Kingdom Internet Service Providers have censored one of the articles available on Wikipedia, an article that features an album cover image of a possibly underage naked girl. The cover in question is of the album “Virgin Killer”, by widely-acclaimed German band, The Scorpions. The photo is not a thing of novelty, as the album cover has already been subjected to controversy ever since it was released, back in 1976.

The URL (which stands for “uniform resource locator”) that leads to the article was inducted into a blacklist published by the Internet Watch Foundation, a non-profit organization aiming to eradicate child pornography from the Internet. The U.K. ISPs routed all Wikipedia traffic through proxy servers, which led to Wikipedia being unable to tell the difference between U.K. users based on their IP addresses. As a result, Wikipedia blocked all the non-registered U.K. users from editing the articles on the site, a process which is part of Wikipedia’s anti-abuse system. It seems that Wikipedia is now advising users to block the image using their browsers, as they do not plan to remove the album cover any time soon.