On Apr 7, 2006, at 2:54 PM, Sam Korn wrote:
Easily: child pornography is visual material that depicts explicit sexual activity involving children. My understanding (albeit unclear, as I've never seen the image in question) is that the image did not portray sexual activity.
It wasn't explicit, but it was very, very strongly implied. Wikipedia's article on [[pornography]] says "Pornography ... is the representation of the human body or human sexual behaviour with the goal of sexual arousal". This image very clearly fits into this.
You asked for "a definition", not "Wikipedia's definition".
You could also define child pornography as visual material that documents actually-occurring explicit sexual activity involving children. Since it's a fantasy sketch, not a photograph, there's no clear evidence that the image documents any actually-occurring activity either. Under US law, as well as the laws of several nations, erotic materials depicting children are perfectly legal so long as no children were harmed in their production--i.e., so long as they do not depict any actually-occurring activity.
Child pornography isn't ipso facto illegal, nor was it deleted on those grounds. It was deleted because child pornography is completely inappropriate for a serious encyclopaedia.
The image in question was completely inappropriate for a serious encyclopedia. Whether it was really child pornography or not is an academic question of little interest to us now.