Going by a recent Fox News report, Jimmy Wales, the cofounder and board member of the popular do-it-yourself encyclopedia Wikipedia, has relinquished his administrative privileges, pertaining to top-level editorial control over the content published on the site.

The move by Wales comes in response to the last month criticism, by a Wikipedia community, of his unilateral deletion of thousands of images that were considered pornographic by Fox. Wales’ removal of content apparently spurred significant backlash from other editors, who felt he had transgressed his limits.

The Fox report said that Wales will still remain a member of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation board, though it also specified that he will be “no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content” on the Wikipedia site.

Relinquishing his rights to edit the content on the Wikipedia site, Wales wrote on a Wikimedia Foundation mailing list: “We were about to be smeared in all media as hosting hardcore pornography and doing nothing about it. Now, the correct storyline is that we are cleaning up. I’m proud to have made sure that storyline broke the way it did, and I’m sorry I had to step on some toes to make it happen.”

Wales was the only person holding a unique “founder” status - a position which was above both registered editors and administrators in the editorial hierarchy within the chiefly volunteer Wikipedia community.