Guardian

Jimmy Wales Wikipedia empire is dealing with an almighty furore in the wake of a series of damaging and particularly zealous stories by Fox News concerning allegations that it is hosting images of child pornography.

Mike Godwin, general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, last night said the idea it is in chaos "is simply nonsense" and described Fox s story as part of its "self-congratulatory anti-porn-on-the-Internet campaign".

"The Fox News campaign against Wikipedia has certainly led to some reactions, of course, but our Board and executive director remain in charge, and in fact we spent more time last week rolling out an interface redesign for Wikipedia than we did thinking about Fox News s attacks," he said in an email to Dave Farber s Listbox email group.

"Furthermore, anyone who thinks that Jimmy s voluntary decision to limit his own editing powers means that no one is in charge suggests a profound ignorance of how the Wikimedia Foundation operates."

The back story

Fox claimed on 27 April that pornographic images were accessible through the site, which bypasses adult content filters to allow Wikipedia to be used in schools. It then later reported that Wales had personally deleted some of the images, as well as recruiting editors to help him - meanwhile Fox also began phoning Wikipedia''s donors, which include Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to increase pressure on Wales.

Wikipedia then imploded; the rest of its editors were furious Wales had taken the very un-Wikipedian approach of making a major decision with such "singular judgment", clearly disagreeing with the "porn" label on many of many of the less extreme images. They promptly reinstating many of the Wikimedia Commons files, which host Wikipedia''s images.

Then came the reports that Wales had relinquished editorial privileges after the furore. He insists that changes to his "founder" editorial status were "a purely technical matter".

Wales retaliated on Twitter, variously calling Fox News bonkers, off their rocker and that the story is nonsense because Fox did not try to contact him before publishing. "I am still actively editing every day," he told, @BrianTomkins, among others, and said the @PaulBoutin that he is "not stepping down or pulling back from anything". He also directed readers to TechCrunch who he had emailed about the situation; that story recaps the history and repeats Wales saying there is no shake-up.

However, at the foundation of this is the allegation about inappropriate content being hosted on the site, and that is something Wikipedia is aware of. Co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002, wrote to the FBI in April expressing particular concern at two categories of the Wikimedia Commons archive which cover paedophilia and Japanese "lolicon" comics which he claimed contained drawings and cartoons of children engaged in sexual acts and therefore violated federal law.

"I think a lot of teachers and education technologists responsible for the filters at public schools do not realise how much and what level of pornography there is in the system," said Sanger in his letter to the FBI. "I am quite sure that if they knew there were pages devoted to paedophilia, it might make them think twice about giving students unrestricted access in schools... Wikimedia has quite a bit of pornography on it and they had no idea."

This is nothing new

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia is a world in itself, with persistent long-running spats between different divisions of editors with different ideologies. This latest episode is nothing new, other than uniting them against one almighty Fox enemy. The bigger issue is the embarrassment for Jimmy Wales himself. I will leave you with the words of Seth Finkelstein, our resident Wikipedia expert:

"The combination of moral-panic-mongers willing to practice a politics
of personal destruction and the ability to anonymously advocate for
one s favorite fetish on one of the world s most widely read websites
leads to constant low-intensity conflict. Wikipedia trades off quality
control for greater production. That same design flaw is manifested in
extremely weak and failure-prone mechanisms for determining the
boundary between provocative and profane."