William Blackstock

Amid the excitement of a new President’s inauguration, it seems natural enough that the deaths of veteran American senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy were missed by the mainstream media. Fortunate, then, that the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia carried the news. Only, of course, neither man was dead – it was a wiki-screw up and Wikipedia’s founder and “benevolent dictator”, Jimmy Wales (pictured), is furious about it. Though this sort of mistake happens often enough in newspapers (remember Mark Twain’s famous response to reading his obituary: “the report of my death was an exaggeration”) Wales has decided that anonymous editing of the site is to blame, and he has suggested restrictions on who can contribute.

Film adaptations of graphic novels such as Zack Snyder's 300 and the upcoming Watchmen mean that graphic novels are growing ever more popular. They're not just in dingy comic book shops anymore but on the shelves in Waterstones and Borders. So is it right that they are now under threat by government anti-pornography legislation?   There are two bills in parliament at the moment that, if successful, could make the possession of "extreme pornographic images" an offence.   An "extreme image" is defined in The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act as one that is "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character".  So far, so good, right?