Further to my previous rant on censorship, it seems the IWF has decided it may have dropped a clanger in its decision to block (most) UK Internet access to a particular web page.

The statement on their website implies the decision to unblock the web page was theirs alone, and makes no mention of the global outcry caused by their initial action.

Surely, the backtracking thought process that went on at the IWF is one that should have happened before blocking the web page in the first place..?

A page on Wikipedia regarding the issue states:

The IWF blocked access to a page on one of the world’s most-visited websites without informing its owners. We understand that their policy is not to contact any of the hosts they block, but commonsense should have told them that blocking such a website might have unforeseen consequences. In particular, they failed to understand that whereas a block of the article itself may well amount to restraint on the guaranteed freedom to receive and impart information, the image itself is uploaded from a different URL which could have been separately blocked by the ISPs with whom they are in partnership; in this way, they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of how websites work, which is chilling in the extreme for a supposed Internet Watchdog.

Chilling indeed; it implies those staff at IWF who make the decision on censorship are also the same staff that implement the URL block – that’s like allowing your grandma to configure your firewall.

So, the good news is that we can all go and read about our favourite German rock band’s controversial Virgin Killer album on Wikipedia without having to look at the version in Google’s cache.

The bad news is that the IWF still have the power to decide what you can and cannot see on the Internet. A bit like AOL in the ’90s.

However, it still remains for the Wikimedia Foundation to decide whether the image in question is in fact illegal, and whether it should be removed from the Wikipedia website.