UK readers may lose access to Wikipedia amid online safety bill requirements.

Wikimedia UK says it will not carry out age verification if required to do so by the bill.

Well, this would cause some major problems for researchers, young and old. I'm wondering how a VPN is viewed in this situation... legal or not?

The Guardian: www.theguardian.com...

Wikipedia could be made inaccessible to UK readers due to issues over complying with the online safety bill, a charity affiliated with the website has warned.

Lucy Crompton-Reid, the chief executive of Wikimedia UK, warned the popular site could be blocked because it will not carry out age verification if required to do so by the bill.

Crompton-Reid said some content on the site could trigger age verification measures under the terms of the bill.

“For example, educational text and images about sexuality could be misinterpreted as pornography,” she said.

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.

Here is the Bill's details and progress in Parliament and the House of Lords... bills.parliament.uk...

If websites just block places with laws like this the people will start demanding the laws go away

a reply to: Encia22

I think this bill is a tool to push the government's digital identity bill , if you lock off part of the internet for those without a government stored digital identity then they'll likely get one eventually.

I see nothing Orwellian about the direction our government has been taking.
***note to the watchers***