June 2010 Archives

According to a FOXNews.com exclusive investigation, inspired in part by this blog's April 20th post Wikipedophilia:

Wikipedia has become home base for a loose worldwide network of pedophiles who are campaigning to spin the popular online encyclopedia in their favor and are trying to lure more people into their world, an investigation by FoxNews.com confirms.

Chat room posts show a clear effort by pedophiles to use Wikipedia, which can be accessed unfiltered in public schools across the country, to further their agenda. Message board posts often include links to specific Wikipedia articles that the participants say need to be edited to "normalize" pedophile behavior in the public eye and to recruit more pedophiles into their community.

“Pedophiles have campaigned to push their point of view that 'pedophilia is OK and doesn’t hurt children' on Wikipedia,” says Xavier Von Erck, director of the online pedophile watchdog organization Perverted Justice Foundation and Wikisposure.com, its offshoot project devoted to tracking pedophiles and pedophile activism on Wikipedia. “This has been a problem since Wikipedia started.

A series of FOXNews.com exposés last month resulted in a shakeup at the top levels of Wikipedia as administrators tried to deal with the growing controversy surrounding pornographic images that appear on the online encyclopedia and its associated websites.

After much pressure from within the Wikipedia community, co-founder Jimmy Wales was forced to relinquish his top-level control over the encyclopedia's content, as well as all of its parent company's projects.

According to FOXNews.com, though he remains the chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales is no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content. Essentially he has gone from having free reign over the content and people involved in the websites to having the same capabilities of a low-level administrator.

Insider sources and publicly available internal listserve discussions revealed that Wikimedia editors rebelled against Wales' attempts to remove pornographic images from the nonprofit's websites. Those images were the subject of heated discussion within the community since their existence was revealed by FoxNews.com on April 27.

Hundreds of listserve discussions among Wikimedia board members, administrators and editors reveal the eruption of a heated and chaotic debate over whether to delete the images, which legal analysts say may violate pornography and obscenity laws.

On May 7, FoxNews.com reported exclusively that Wales had personally deleted many of the images from Wikimedia's servers, and that he'd ordered that thousands more be purged. Now many of those images have been restored to their original web pages.

For more on these stories visit:

EXCLUSIVE: Shakeup at Wikipedia in Wake of Porn Purge

EXCLUSIVE: Pedophiles Find a Home on Wikipedia

ChildLaw Blog posts on Wikipedia

Almost two years after a federal lawsuit was filed to secure the civil legal justice demanded by Congress in 2006, Masha Allen's federal lawsuit was dismissed today--incredibly--for "failure to properly plead a basis for federal jurisdiction."

Despite the trenchant involvement of a reconstructed legal team consisting of much-sought after guardian ad litem Cambria County bankruptcy attorney Timothy J. Sloan (who replaced Masha's former mother Faith Allen as lead plaintiff), Georgia attorneys David S. Bills (who blogs anonymously about Masha's case at poundpuplegacy.org), William Q. Bird and Darren Summerville (who were originally hired by Faith Allen who reportedly now lives in Georgia), and Pennsylvania First Amendment attorney Thomas Vecchio (who replaced renowned Philadelphia attorney Robert N. Hunn who withdrew under protest last year), Masha "did not oppose (and consents to) dismissal [of the lawsuit] without prejudice on ground of lack of subject matter jurisdiction."

Masha, who turns 18 in August, vowed to fight on by "pursuing the claim outlined in the Amended Complaint in an alternative forum." No word yet on where her case is headed, if anywhere.

Despite the involvement of no less than 27 attorneys in the last 7 years, justice remains elusive for one of the most notorious victims of child trafficking in recent history.

Order to Show Cause
Letter Consenting to Dismissal