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Wikipedia The Internet

Thousands of Wikipedia Pages Vandalized With Giant Swastikas (gizmodo.com) 73

Posted by BeauHD from the big-gap-in-security dept.
Early Monday morning, the Wikipedia pages for a slew of celebrities, writers, and political figures were replaced by full-page spreads of black and white swastikas on a bright red background. The vandalism was reversed within minutes of being noticed by users. Gizmodo reports: Wikipedia is certainly no stranger to vandalism on some of its more controversial pages, but this incident highlighted one of the lesser-known weaknesses in the platform's airtight content moderation policies. Instead of targeting the content on any particular Wikipedia page, the vandal behind this blitz targeted a particular article template used by more than 50,000 different Wikipedia pages, including those for Jennifer Lopez, Joe Biden, and Discworld author Terry Pratchett.

According to an ongoing discussion by a handful of Wikipedia admins on one of the site's public forums, the template's since been fixed and the vandal in question -- who first joined the site about ten days ago -- has been put on an indefinite ban. One admin noted that by targeting these article templates directly, the user was able to bypass the typical protections put on certain Wikipedia pages to protect them from vandals in the first place.
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Thousands of Wikipedia Pages Vandalized With Giant Swastikas More

Thousands of Wikipedia Pages Vandalized With Giant Swastikas

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  • Meh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shm ( 235766 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @08:04PM (#61699127)

    The best way to use Wikipedia is to ignore the text, look at the references, and use those to do your research.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by lsllll ( 830002 )
      I agree that the references are invaluable, but the content is usually on par with the reference, no?

      • Re: Meh (Score:2)

        by shm ( 235766 )

        Not always. For the hard sciences - physics/maths et al - that is mostly true.

        History can be distorted and the references lead one to other material where you get the bigger picture.

        Aside - never understood Wikipediaâ(TM)s fear of primary sources. Even the co-founder Larry Sanger has commented on that.

  • HolUp (Score:2, Insightful)

    by paiute ( 550198 )
    He puts frigging swatikas on 50,000 pages and gets an indefinite ban?

    "This is your only warning; if you vandalize Wikipedia again, as you did at Template:Wbr, you may be blocked from editing without further notice. Kleuske (talk) 13:57, 16 August 2021 (UTC)"

    What the fuck do you have to do to get banned?

    "This is your only warning; if you sodomize Jimmy Wales' mother again, you may be blocked from editing without further notice. Kleuske (talk) 13:57, 16 August 2021 (UTC)"

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Do you know what 'indefinite' means?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Doing it a second time probably will get you banned

    • Indefinite ban/permanent ban - meh! It's required, but a waste of time if not followed up with more serious action.

      This one guy needlessly upset and wasted the time of tens or hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Why is Wikipedia not formally prosecuting him? They know his IP, they know the time he made his edits. At last pursue with relevant authorities - and importantly - make the news and progress of the prosecution public.

      Once that's run its course, and he's made recompense, then by all means wel

      • Re:HolUp (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <.moc.eeznerif.todhsals. .ta. .treb.> on Monday August 16, 2021 @11:53PM (#61699683) Homepage

        Prosecute him for what exactly?
        Wikipedia invites users to modify pages, which he did, the fact that his content was stupid and had to waste someone else's time to remove it is not illegal.
        That's assuming they can find him, which would require significant effort if he took steps to anonymise himself.

        What he did was a juvenile but ultimately harmless prank, which highlighted some areas where wikipedia need to improve. Make the improvements and move on, lesson learned.

        • Might not be illegal where you are. It's certainly illegal in Germany.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bert64 ( 520050 )

            What matters is illegality where the perpetrator is located. And assuming that the perpetrator has taken steps to mask their identity, actually working out where they are located.
            Given these two factors, i doubt they would go to the effort of trying to locate the perpetrator on the off chance he might be located in a country where his actions might be illegal. All of that effort would be entirely wasted if they ultimately discover he's in a country where he's done nothing illegal.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      How about the people who defaced /. with ads for Trump coins. Not so much Trump, but that the average intelligence of a /. reader is about that of the Fox News viewer that would be scammed into pay the inflated prices for silver trinkets.

    • Re:HolUp (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kleuske2 ( 8544075 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @08:25AM (#61700555)
      Hi. Kleuske here. I put that warning there, knowing full well that user would get banned anyway, as is evidence by the following line on that page. Work is underway to prevent this kind of vandalism in future by more stringently protecting templates that are massively transcluded. However, the open nature of Wikipedia makes it hard to prevent vandalism. It is easy to mock Wikipedia. It's not perfect (far from), it does not even consider itself a reliable source, vanity articles exist etc. That does not require any effort. Nevertheless, it provides a valuable service to readers all over the planet and, hence, contributing to this project is a lot more useful than taking cheap potshots on slashdot, whllst contributing nothing.

  • Why is Wikipedia vandalism worthy of a news story?

    • Be grateful, at least it wasn't goatse. Although I think it *would* be funnier, especially if the mainstream news media had to explain it.

      • You get used to it way quicker than you think.

        The only things I *didn't* get used to, were 3guys1hammer, the Taliban beheadings that went viral in the early/mid 2000s, the stories that child rape victims told me, and the stories that war victims told me.
        (I still think it is extremely important to know that those things exist and *are* real. All the brainwashed SS Hitler Youth that were like little cute blond Daleks thinking murdering a Jew is a joyous experience to giggle at (Source: Grandma), forcing child

      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Could've taken something from this, plenty of weird shit in there.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Relevant on Slashdot because it is likely to be the same guy who used to vandalise every Slashdot story with a large ASCII swastika before he got banned from here ...

      (Someone already posted that theory but got down-moderated so you can't see it ...)

      • It's more than one person, my friend.

        Not much more, but I can find you a dozen candidates on *chan in probably less than 15 minutes. ;)

    • Because some combination of slashdot filters working and maybe swastika douche moving on happened.

      • I haven't seen the never-ending Nazi posts for a while.

        • I have to confess I sometimes miss the old troll posts from about 20 yrs ago... I had a bunch of them saved in a txt file around here somewhere, absolutely classic....

          • Yeah, we used to have a higher class of troll around here. They just don't make them like this anymore.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by glitch! ( 57276 )

              Yeah, we used to have a higher class of troll around here.

              Hello.

              I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can't. She is crying. Don't cry, Mommy! Mommy is always sad, but she says it's not my fault. I asked her if it was God's fault, but she didn't answer; only started crying harder. I don't ask her that anymore.

              The reason she is so sad is because I'm so sick. I was born without a body. It doesn't hurt, except when I try to breathe. The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors sa

        • Waiiiit, how did you manage to use the word "Nazi"?
          Last time I checked, it was blocked exactly because of those swastika posts!

    • Maybe because people are still quick to trust it, despite the editors flagrantly vandalizing the truth with their political biases, and shutting down any editors who post legitimate corrections on any politically sensitive topic.

    • Why is Wikipedia vandalism worthy of a news story?

      Could it be because it's tech related, a case of mass vandalism, the first case of template vandalism, it bypasses systems in place so has a security related angle too?

      WTF do you expect of Slashdot, another story of Trump terrorising guests at Mar-a-Lago? Go find yourself a different site.

    • It got you here viewing ads and interacting didn't it?

  • ...slashdot troll look. Welcome to the club.

  • Fox News Explanation... (Score:5, Funny)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Monday August 16, 2021 @10:16PM (#61699485)
    False-flag operation led by Antifa.

  • oh, gotta love Bots spreading the fake hate.

  • ... it was the Wikipedia admins themselves, in order to put a final nail in the "everybody can edit" coffin that's been bothering them way too long, not because it always was a fallacy to begin with, but because they want to be the only type of extremist nutjobs to shape public view. ;)

    But I learned one thing: People believe things (in other words: think something is true, no matter if they actually observed it, or even if they observed contradicting evidence) because they *need* to. It has nothing to do wi

  • I think that as long as "mainstream society" is predictably and without fail reacting with fear, outrage and importantly sensationalist publishing like an upset nun each time they see a certain symbol, fringe people will find a home under the skinhead/neo-nazi/whatever term and use their symbols/language to upset the "mainstream society" in order to "hit back" at them (because the reaction is such fun), and at the same time get some twisted version of the recognition they crave.

    But hey, that's just my thou

  • The real vandals are the activists who immediately revert any attempt to make a wikipedia page more evenhanded or less of an opinion piece.

  • Reverting a template is child's play: even easier than vandalizing one. Wikipedia deals with this kind of shit on a daily basis.

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