The U.K. Internet Service Providers have censored a Wikipedia article, one that includes an image of a naked and possibly underage girl. Due to this fact, U.K. Users of the online encyclopedia were unable to edit other articles, as an unintended side effect. The articles talks about Scorpions' album, “Virgin Killer”, a record that has generated controversy due to its cover photo ever since its launch, in 1976. The URL of the article was added to a blacklist published by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit group that works with the law enforcement to block and remove child pornography from Web sites. However, non-residential Internet connections are not affected by this ban.

As for the fact that U.K. users were unable to edit other articles, that was caused by the ISPs unintentionally. They routed Wikipedia traffic through a proxy server, and, therefore, the site was unable to distinguish U.K. users from one another by their IP address. That triggered Wikipedia's anti-abuse mechanism, that blocked all non-registered U.K. users from editing articles. Anyway, in a statement issued by IWF on Sunday, the album cover was flagged as a “potentially illegal indecent image of a child under 18.”

In its defense, the Wikimedia Foundation said the image is hosted by several other Web sites accessed by U.K. citizens: "We have no reason to believe the image has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world." However, a notice on the “discussion” section for the article read that the album cover will not be removed, so users will have to configure their browsers to block it. This is the first time a Wikipedia article has been censored.