Free-speech zealots among Wikipedia's volunteer editors have insisted that the original cover of Virgin Killer, a 1976 album by German heavy metal band the Scorpions — shown here with a teddy-bear bowdlerization — must run alongside the site's page for the album. Their stubbornness has landed the Wikipedia page on a list of porn sites maintained by Internet Watch, a British group, whose censorship recommendations many British ISPs follow.

The ban seems like overkill, since it covers the album page, not just the image in question. But the fact that Wikipedia has let matters get this far speaks to the site's screwed-up culture. Erik Möller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, has defended child pornography in the past. His extremist stance is mirrored by an outspoken minority within Wikipedia's ranks of editors.

The Wikipedian child-porn fetish is disturbing. But it's a sign of a much deeper problem. Wikipedia editors love to make up bureaucratic rules. It's part of what makes the site so intimidating to new users, and why bias and misreporting so often go uncorrected on the site. Knowledgeable people are scared away by the need to engage in time-wasting arguments with bored teenagers and obsessive Internet users for whom enforcing these rules is a source of cheap entertainment. Why Internet providers are banning Wikipedia pages instead of Wikipedia editors is beyond me.

Instead, Lih got a 408-word lecture from Möller, who runs Wikipedia's technology and volunteer-editing operations (when he's not defending child pornography, that is), about how Lih should have read the manual. In the time he took to write that comment, couldn't he have called Lih and offered assistance?

He could have, but he wouldn't. Möller, a longtime Wikipedia editor before he became a staffer at the foundation, shows the Wikipedia culture Lih chronicles at its very worst: Insisting on process rather than solving problems, lecturing and hectoring online rather than reaching out. Möller isn't some aberration; he's entirely typical of the breed he now oversees. Wikipedia's readers may deserve better, but its editors surely don't.

One wonders if trustees of the Sloan Foundation, which recently donated millions to Wikipedia after Möller pitched them, share his views on pedophilia. BoyLinks finds his pro-pedophilia arguments agreeable, as does Martijn, a Dutch counterpart to the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

Möller himself appears to be growing aware of the need to whitewash his history. He recently removed a vile image of child pornography from his Humanist.de website. But evidence remains in Google's cache.

The notion of a person with such views shaping Wikipedia's articles on "child sexuality" is unsettling enough. What critics of Möller should find equally disturbing is what, exactly Möller hopes to accomplish in his official role at Wikipedia. He has long made no secret that, like founder Jimmy Wales, he, too, wants to profit from the work of Wikipedia's many volunteer editors. Since January, he's been drawing a paycheck from the Wikimedia Foundation. But I doubt his financial goals end there. If Wikipedia starts selling advertising, or otherwise profiting from its users' work, will Möller argue that the site's users were asking for it?

(Photo by Leonard Witt)