The Internet Watch Foundation says it is still reconsidering whether its ban should remain on the image of a young girl used on the Scorpions' album Virgin Killer, after that ban prevented a number of British users accessing Wikipedia.
A spokeswoman for the IWF said that to her knowledge it was the first time in its decade-long history that any image or page banned by the IWF had been reassessed, and the first time that any page or image on Wikipedia had been banned. The IWF normally bans more than 10,000 images and associated web pages every year.
The ban is being reconsidered under the IWF's appeals and correction procedures.
The realisation that the IWF's ban on the picture, instituted on Friday, had cut many people off from the encyclopaedia site because the picture appeared on an article there led to frustration among many UK net users who had not realised that such a filtering system was in place. The IWF passes a "blacklist" of web locations alleged to hold child pornography or images of abuse to ISPs and mobile operators to prevent their access from inside the UK.
The IWF said yesterday that it had instituted a review of the decision to ban the image – which had been judged to rank 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is the most serious under its rules.
However Amazon US no longer risks being blocked under IWF's rulings. The image, as an album cover, had been on its site earlier this week, but has now been removed, apparently on the site's own initiative.
Meanwhile if the IWF decides to let the ban stand it will have to block a lot more sites. Its spokeswoman said that "plenty" of other sites which also host the picture have been reported to it since yesterday, when the banning gained wide notoriety.