LONDON, May 10 (UPI) -- Controversy over sexually explicit material on Wikipedia has the site's co-founders at odds over "pornography" allegations, observers say.
After a complaint from Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to the FBI that the Web encyclopedia site was "knowingly distributing child pornography," the site's other co-founder Jimmy Wales deleted images without consultation, angering many of the site's contributors, BBC News reported Monday.
Volunteers who help maintain the site protested Wales' decision to delete was undemocratic and taken too quickly, the BBC said.
An ongoing debate over explicit content has recently "come to a head," Michael Peel, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said.
The main issue, he said, is "whether the content is educational."
Some images deemed by the Wikipedia community to have educational merit have since been reinstated.
In response to the controversy, Wales has voluntarily revoked many "permissions" given him as Wikipedia's founder to delete and edit "protected" content, the BBC reported.
Wales said the voluntary revocation is "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted."
