Wikileads

The Wikimedia Foundation censored a Wikinews article about possible child pornography on Wikipedia, according to Wikileaks‘ most recently leaked document.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent company of Wikipedia and Wikinews, as well as a bunch of other free-content, user-created wikis. Wikileaks is not associated with Wikimedia.

Here’s the scoop. What happened, and when:

• A Wikipedia article about the Scorpions’ 1976 album “Virgin Killer” has contained, since 2006, an image of the album’s controversial original cover. This cover was banned in the U.S. because it depicts a naked, prepubescent girl in a sexually provocative pose. For a doctored, PG-rated version of the cover, check out this Gawker post.
• A couple of weeks ago, on May 6, World Net Daily, a conservative online news source, published an article about the many sexually explicit photos on Wikipedia. This article referenced the Wikipedia article about the Scorpions album.
• The next day, May 7, WND announced that the FBI was investigating Wikipedia for possible violation of U.S. child-pornography law. According to U.S. child-pornography law, it is illegal to capture, transmit or possess an image of a prepubescent child in a sexual pose.
• Wikinews authors investigated the incident and wrote an article about what happened internally after the FBI got involved. Wikipedia has a fairly complicated deletion policy. It says that articles should be edited, moved of merged with other articles before any formal deletion process is undertaken. The article in question was discussed, and the majority of people involved in the discussion wanted to keep the offending image on Wikipedia. But a Wikipedia administrator still removed the image.
• The rest of the Wikinews article elaborated on the porn-on-Wikipedia controversy: Some Wikipedia articles contain graphic images (see penis, breast, autofellatio); Wikimedia Commons, a wiki dedicated to hosting images that could potentially be used on other Wikimedia projects, contains tons of nudity (see striptease, nude in public, World Naked Bike Ride); and Erik Möller, deputy directory of the Wikimedia Foundation, thinks kids should be able to have sex with each other whenever they feel the urge.

Until this point, little in this controversy was shocking. Wikipedia gets near-constant attention for the naked pics in some of its articles, and people love to write about vice. So when WND broke the story about the Scorpions album cover, and especially after the FBI got involved, of course people started writing about it. Nothing surprising here.

What is surprising is how the Wikimedia Foundation responded. They censored the Wikinews article about the controversy. They censored it before it was ever posted. From Wikileaks:

The article was deleted immediately prior to publication by the Wikimedia foundation head office (not by the author or the Wikinews volunteer editorial team). It is believed the article was deleted because it did not promote Wikimedia, although the excuse used to do so, by Wikimedia counsel Michael Godwin was that it might be defamatory.

Now, if Wikinews were a traditional (i.e. editorially controlled) news organization, this sort of censorship would not be a big deal. Editors kill articles all the time, for many reasons. They kill them because they’re untimely or boring or under-researched or defamatory or just plain bad. Editors are responsible for the content of their publications, so they can decide what goes in and what stays out.

But the Internet is different. On many Web sites, especially wikis, tons of people contribute to the content. And unlike in traditional media, editors and administrators are not legally responsible for the content posted by their users.

Why? Because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says that internet service providers (including bloggers, hosters, domain name holders and the like) are not liable for third-party content on their sites. Even if they edit the content. Even if they pre-screen it. If someone else does something illegal on your website, it’s (almost always) not your problem.

But if you take control away from your users — if you, like Wikinews, become an editor in the traditional sense and go against your own policy for reasons you have proclaimed can be overcome, and just to protect yourself from bad press — you could lose your Section 230 immunity, and that could suck.