Talk:Internet Watch Foundation

Advert

The lower part of the 'website' section appears to be written by some one from the organisation - I've added the 'advert' tag as it seemed the most apropriate. 80.41.171.18 08:53, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Their website

Their own web site [1] says that their mission statement is "To work in partnership with internet service providers, telecommunication companies, mobile operators, software providers, the police, Government and the public to minimise the availability of online illegal content, particularly child abuse images.". We currently make them look broader than they are. Secretlondon 03:52, 31 March 2007 (UTC) Aim [2] Our aim is to minimise the availability of potentially illegal internet content, specifically:

• child abuse images hosted anywhere in the world
• criminally obscene content hosted in the UK
• incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK

Role [3]

• Operating a 'notice and take-down' service to alert hosting service providers of criminal content found on their servers.
• Recommending that internet service providers should not carry certain newsgroups in accordance with policy guidelines adopted by the IWF Board.
• Acting as a relevant authority in accordance with the Memorandum of Understanding concerning Section 46 Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre deal with IM, chatroom etc.[4] Secretlondon 03:58, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

• "Please note that the terms "child pornography" or "child porn" can act to legitimise images which are not pornography. Rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as child sexual abuse images."

What a lovely example of a neutral point of view :-) lmno 03:37, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

The whole entry needs a NPOV transfusion. It reads like a corporate statement by the Internet Watch Foundation. Loose terms like "illegal content" are meaningless in an international context. IWF blocks content that it considers to be illegal or potentually illegal under UK laws. Meowy 02:22, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Reminds me of the Great Firewall of China.209.161.213.102 22:24, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Me too. What if they censor anything the gov't doesn't want the people to know? Deathkenli 07:46, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Editing by User:Internet Watch Foundation

Yesterday, a user named "Internet Watch Foundation" made an edit to this page. A request for them to confirm their identity and explain their edits has been placed on their talk page. In the meanwhile, their edits have been reverted to avoid conflicts of interest. —Preceding unsigned comment added by CheshireKatz (talk • contribs) 20:08, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Numbers

As a result, less than 1% of potentially illegal content has apparently been hosted in the UK since 2003, down from 18% in 1997.

1. Meaningless numbers: 1% of illegal content: of illegal content hosted worldwide? Of illegal content accessed from the UK? Of illegal content investigated by IWF?
2. No source.

David.Monniaux (talk) 21:49, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

The source is the IWF I think. I can try and find a quote but it does seem pretty meaningless regardless. Secretlondon (talk) 22:12, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Heres a ref for the 1% number from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7350295.stm. Basically only 1% of the worlds child porn is hosted on british computers. ^{(Hypnosadist)} 01:24, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

• I suspect it will actually be 1% of the material they investigate, rather than 1% of the world's child porn. lmno (talk) 18:28, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

We should not cite numbers that have no definition — these are marketing-speak, not encyclopedic. David.Monniaux (talk) 06:13, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Netsense

Should there be a mention of the IWF being funded by netsense? Klosterdev (talk) 21:56, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Got a source? If so put it in. ^{(Hypnosadist)} 01:25, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Award for Chief Executive, Peter Robbins OBE, QPM,

This from their website http://www.iwf.org.uk/media/news.226.htm he got the ISPA Internet Hero award.

Introduction

If, as a casual reader, I read the introduction of this article, then I'm not really informed as to the activities of this organization. For instance, I hear that it maintains a blacklist of sites to be censored; yet this is not mentioned.

Later on in the article, we don't have much of a discussion of this blacklist and the criteria applied for sites to be in or out of it. David.Monniaux (talk) 08:38, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

About the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)

Please note that "child pornography", "child porn" and "kiddie porn" are not acceptable terms. The use of such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as child sexual abuse images. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ticram (talk • contribs) 21:43, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

The above paragraph is a verbatim citation of the page that is linked. I am unsure what is meant by this. In any case, "child porn" and "kiddie porn" are too casual to be appropriate in an encyclopedia article; as to "child sexual abuse image", this is obviously a politically motivated term, and we are kindly provided with the link confirming that it has been coined and is supported by an organisation which makes an industry of the denouncing of child pornography. I would therefore find it utterly unacceptable for Wikipedia to adopt such a term, and I find attempts to promote it orwellian in nature. Rama (talk) 12:38, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

The IWF is a charitable organisation funded by the EU so it incorrect to claim it makes an industry of denouncing child pornography. Thanks, SqueakBox 23:07, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

blocking

I'm not sure that getting blocked is relevant to this article. That has to do with the way ISPs are filtering, and the way we responded. The IWF just makes the list, and can't be blamed for the way it's enforced (at least, that's the way I understand it.) Thoughts?--Werdan7^{T @} 03:29, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

yeah I guess their just "under orders" right? What should be done is thier ip adress should be blocked from wikipedia

Well, they can be blamed for blocking one of the top 10 web sites in such a careless way. Instead of (just) blocking the image, they blocked the article in which it appears. And they didn't even do it right, as there are numerous workarounds for accessing the image. And due to the large publicity a lot of people, including in the UK, do. Which is not a big problem since this was a borderline case in the first place. Their "one size fits all" approach of never contacting any websites obviously backfired.

Actually, in a reply to my email the Chief Executive said it "wouldn't be fair" for me to assume they "haven't been in contact with a Wiki representative". This might refer to the statement they made on Sunday and which I didn't know about when writing them. If it refers to anything they did last week, then it appears they approached the wrong people. --Hans Adler (talk) 10:43, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Keep it on topic, guys. This isn't a forum to discuss what has happened; it's a discussion page for the article itself. Thanks, PeterSymonds (talk) 17:42, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

The block undoubtedly resulted directly from the IWF's actions; nevertheless, they had no way of knowing (presumably) that the implementation of the blacklist by ISPs is such that all traffic to the parent sites of blacklisted pages would be routed through such a narrow IP field. Given that the routing issues aren't their fault, I've shortened the bit about the block, citing it as a "side-effect" of the blacklisting, without going into technical detail.

I've also removed several edits from this talk page per WP:TALK (Some examples of appropriately editing others' comments: [...] Deleting material not relevant to improving the article) and added a source comment to the bottom of the page, to discourage people from using this as a POV forum. Might want to keep an eye on this page, methinks. haz (talk) 17:47, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your edit. Insults against the IWF and its members (like comparisons with certain ideological groups!) shouldn't be part of the discussion page. Please watch out for these. And yes: This statement is relevant because such insults happened an will sadly happen again. 91.113.91.223 (talk) 18:10, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I think we can stop worrying about potentially blaming the IWF for something that is not really their fault:

It was a specific URL that was added to the list that had that image one it. That URL also happened to have text on it, but that’s irrelevant – we’re assessing the image. [5]

If this was indeed Sarah Robertson's literal response, then there is something very wrong with their process. It sounds as if she had never seen the source code of an HTML page. --Hans Adler (talk) 11:54, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

She keeps referring to the image as a "child sex abuse" image too, which I feel cheapens real child sex abuse. The quote by Hans shows that either their is a huge problem with the way they work, or she is simply a spokeswoman with no technical expertise and was inadequately briefed - although this would suggest other problems with their processes. A full discussion of their politicisation of language, methods and response to requests for clarification and criticism should be added to the article, along with technical details of the block/blacklisting. Hopefully there will be very many sources for this appearing this week. Hopefully this debatable will open up their process, shine more light on them, make them accountable, and we can cover this process as and when it happens. Verbal chat 12:23, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Apparently they use the term intentionally instead of "child pornography", which they do not consider acceptable because "such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused and as such should be referred to as child sexual abuse images." [6]. I would be able to follow them if the sentence stopped at "not pornography" – it may be hard to prove "the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer" (see pornography). While shifting the point of view from the market for such pictures to their production does make some sense, I am not sure they have thought it through very well. The problem is not just the children abused in the production, it's also that such pictures break a taboo that exists for very good reasons. Otherwise there would be no problem with comics etc. And both terms share the problem that their literal meaning is more restrictive than what they actually censor, the image in question being neither pornographic (just in extremely bad taste) nor (apparently) the result of what would have been abuse in the 70s. --Hans Adler (talk) 12:54, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I find this Orwellian use of language very interesting. Have any news outlets picked up on this yet and discussed it? I hope so, so that it can be discussed here. Verbal chat 13:45, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

After thinking about this a bit more, I became aware of another factor. Pornography is very much taboo in public discourse, but very much accepted in society so long as it's hidden. The term "child pornography" is dangerous insofar as it suggests a similar phenomenon. I wouldn't be surprised if some criminals would use this as justification – that the taboo nature of child pornography is supposedly only a façade. I am beginning to see the merits of the term "child abuse pictures". --Hans Adler (talk) 20:05, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not convinced, for the reasons given - however child pornography as a term can be equally misused. I should think any criminals trying such a defence with actual child abuse images would be recommended to find a new barrister by the judge, and to plead guilty! The use of blanket terms is probably wrong, but the use of terms in order to change how things are perceived by a body such as the IWF which acts as a censor seems inappropriate. The IWF should stay out of that aspect, and just use terms like "a proscribed or possible illegal image", perhaps. However, that's probably not going to happen - if the IWF survives. I guess this is off topic though, but interesting. It's not something I'll be writing to my MP about anyway. Verbal chat 20:17, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Recommend replacing image with the association's logo

Fair-use suggests and may require that we replace the image in the infobox with something else, such as the organization's logo. Comments? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 00:43, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that would be a much better idea. Most companies are recognisable by their logos, and a logo is a better representation of the organisation than a webpage screenshot. PeterSymonds (talk) 13:51, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

The issue was that {{Infobox Website}} was being used, which treated the IWF as a website rather than as an entity. I've changed it to use {{Infobox Non-profit}} instead, and moved the logo from a random floating spot to the infobox. haz (talk) 19:13, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Staff

{{editprotected}} The article says that a staff of 7 people is responsible for compiling and maintaining the blacklist. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/08/amazon-internet-censorship-iwf however talks of four people going through the list. The 3 may be management, but the Guardian number is more recent than the one in the cited source (which I can't find). --Ticram (talk) 19:28, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

That template is really only necessary on full protected pages. I can't speak to the necessity of the edit mentioned above but I trust an established user familiar with the topic that frequents this page will be able to make that decision. l'aquatique || talk 08:39, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Y Done. The Guardian's figure seems to be backed up by this orgchart. It states that there are 15 employees working for the IWF; factor out the board members at the top, do a bit of mental arithmetic, and it works out that four must be working in the hotline team. I've made the change to the page, using the Guardian article as the source. (By the way, {{editsemiprotected}} can be used to request changes to semi-protected pages.) haz (talk) 09:13, 10 December 2008 (UTC)