Blackarrow Consulting

The IWF has now backed down from censoring an image on Wikipedia, the censorship of which was adjudged by many to be too wide ranging by taking in the entire page, in addition to the fact that the image (although not nice) was generally available in libraries, record stores and online download services. The secondary impact was the blocking of anonymous editing of Wikipedia from the whole of the UK due to mechanism of filtering used, as presented on my personal blog.

This can be really seen as both a functional failure of the IWF and a technical failure of the control method, both of which will have an impact in the future on more than text and graphics on Wikipedia, but also on other sites like Ning. This sort of filtering is not going to go away, it just has to resolve the problems that have been apparent in this incident and also it needs to adapt to the future demands through the wide availability of Internet based video services as I blogged yesterday. In addition, the issue of political control also has to be resolved – something that has had a light touch in the UK but has been an issue in other countries, and could get to become a very prickly issue with the new found prudish attitudes that are bubbling under at this time as seen in Sachsgate in the UK and the Wardrobe malfunction in the US.