This was...weird. apparently wikipedia was hacked or something? Visiting Wikipedia, I'm seeing this undismissable modal that blocks access to the page.

I was trying to read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_elections

It looks like this was a rogue asshole who took over that page actually. Because after many refreshes.. now it appears to be a blank page and says it was recently edited by some user.

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[–] [S] 9 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Yeah I agree but my first thought was it must've been something more because of the full screen dialogue. I assumed a page itself could not have something like that embedded. But I admittedly know not much

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  • [–] 10 points 6 days ago (3 children)

    It can just not without someone noticing. It's one of those "against the rules, not against reality" kind of things, so it makes sense it was reverted quickly.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

    Does that mean editors can insert arbitrary html/css?

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  • [–] 10 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    Absolutely.

    Wikipedia isn't wholly unprotected from vandalism and other such attacks, they always keep a post history, users without an account are logged, admins can lock pages or ban people, and I dunno all the details but some things can cause an automatic rollback, but yeah.

    There's nothing stopping me from messing with styles, content, inserting external links to things. If I do it in a way that's against the rules, there's also nothing stopping someone from reverting all my changes in a couple of clicks and banning me or my IP. If someone was truly malicious and used a VPN to dodge bans, that'll get a page locked from everyone and make edits need to be approved, which is much more common for political pages.

    But yeah, Wikipedia is open, and that means open.

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