The addition of Wikipedia to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has led to six broadband service providers in the UK, including Virgin Media, O2 (Be Broadband), TalkTalk (Opal, Carphone Warehouse), Easynet, Demon and Plusnet, placing restriction on access to the site.

The publication of a controversial historic cover for the Scorpions album titled ‘Virgin Killers’ which depicted a partially naked underage girl was the reason for the filter being applied following the raising of concerns. The method employed, however, had wider ramifications according to a Wikinews item.
A statement on the Wiki site advised “The measures applied redirect traffic for a significant portion of the UK’s Internet population through six servers which can log and filter the content that is available to the end user. A serious side-effect of this is the inability of administrators on Wikimedia sites to block vandals and other troublemakers without potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of innocent contributors who are contributing to the sites in good faith. Contributors or individuals attempting to view an affected image or file, depending on their ISP, may get a warning saying, “we have blocked this page because, according to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), it contains indecent images of children or pointers to them; you could be breaking UK law if you viewed the page.”. Other ISPs provide blank pages, 404 errors, or other means of blocking the content.”

The use of transparent proxies to rout Wikipedia traffic, which is a method that is often used to manage http traffic and ease the burden to bandwidth for broadband internet service providers, seems to be where the problem is stemming from. This causes a problem were thousands of users that are with a single ISP can appear to have exactly the same IP (Internet protocol) address.

The knock on effect of this would be that if any user is banned by Wikipedia for an abuse relating to either editing new or old content or contributing new material then anyone from that ISP with the same IP Address would also be banned. This leads to the conclusion that by IWF successfully prevent users from accessing the specific material the ISP themselves have, without realising it, stopped millions of user from adding to the Wikipedia.