Wikipedia censorship over album cover

[Paul Mather]

On 9 Dec 2008, at 6:12 AM, M Holmes wrote:

> Claims that up to 70% of the UK can't edit Wikipedia due to Internet
> Watch Foundation censorship of a Scorpions album cover:

There's more coverage on this on The Register, and The Guardian even  
had a flowchart outlining how the filtering is done.

The reason why most of the UK can't edit Wikipedia is because of the  
poor transparent proxying performed by the filtering mechanism.  (Not  
enough information about the original request is passed onwards.)  So,  
to Wikipedia, it appeared as if all requests were coming from behind  
the same IP address and they blocked anonymous editing of pages  
because they couldn't disambiguate the edits to a level of granularity  
that satisfies them.  Registered WikiWonks can still log in and edit,  
though, you'll no doubt be delighted to hear. :-)

The filtering system didn't sound too scalable to me.  What we need to  
do is to get some more popular sites onto the block list (there were  
hints of Amazon; mebbe someone should whip up a YouTube clip of a  
bunch of people holding up the Scorpions album cover to get that site  
added) so as to have the thing bring itself down under the weight of  
its own creakiness... >:-)

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
  deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
         --- Frank Vincent Zappa