Wikipedia may no longer be available in UK because of online safety bill

UK readers may no longer be able to access Wikipedia due to issues over the government’s online safety bill. A charity affiliated with the popular crowdsourcing website, Wikimedia UK, said it could be blocked because it will not carry out age verification if required to do so by the bill.

Lucy Crompton-Reid, the chief executive of Wikimedia UK, said it was “definitely possible that one of the most visited websites in the world – and a vital source of freely accessible knowledge and information for millions of people – won’t be accessible to UK readers (let alone UK-based contributors)”.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia site, has said it will not carry out age checks on users, which it fears will be required by the act. The foundation also believes the bill’s content moderation requirements will not be enforceable.

Speaking to the BBC, Crompton-Reid said some content on the site could trigger age verification measures under the terms of the bill. She said:  “For example, educational text and images about sexuality could be misinterpreted as pornography.

She added: “The increased bureaucracy imposed by this bill will have the effect that only the really big players with significant compliance budgets will be able to operate in the UK market. This could have dire consequences on the information ecosystem here and is, in my view, quite the opposite of what the legislation originally set out to achieve.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, vice-president of global advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, has said carrying out age verification would “violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors”.

The online safety bill requires commercial pornography sites to carry out age checks. It will also require sites such as Wikipedia to proactively prevent children from encountering pornographic material, with the bill in its current form referring to age verification as one of the possible tools for this.

However, there is also a question mark over whether any of Wikipedia’s content would meet the definition of pornographic material in the bill. Fines up to 10% of worldwide revenue and, in extreme cases, service access bans in the UK are possible penalties for breaking the act.

Crompton-Reid added that there were more than 6.6m articles on Wikipedia and it was “impossible to imagine” how the site would cope with moderating content to comply with the bill. She said: “Worldwide, there are two edits per second across Wikipedia’s 300-plus languages.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: “The world-leading online safety bill has been designed to strike the balance between tackling harm without imposing unnecessary burdens on low-risk tech companies.

“Ofcom will take a reasonable and proportionate approach when monitoring and enforcing the safety duties outlined in the bill, focusing on services where the risk of harm is highest.”