Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia
Blacklist of Wikipedia in the UK
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 ten-year-old 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 is 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, and was replaced in some markets with an alternate cover image featuring a photo of the band members. The IWF described the image as "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". 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.
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), and that the album cover was being made available unfiltered on other major sites including Amazon.co.uk (from which it was later removed), and available for sale in the UK, 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, and preventing anonymous edits from these ISPs while the URL remained on the blacklist. This was described by the IWF as unintended "collateral damage". 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.
“Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia” enters the record as blacklist of Wikipedia in the UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Internet, Watch and Foundation can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2614501. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.