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.
Comment on Wikipedia hacked..?
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 12 hours agoYeah 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
Khanzarate@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Does that mean editors can insert arbitrary html/css?
Khanzarate@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Ah. I had always assumed the text formatting was limited to specific options in a “rich text” type editor. Thanks for this explanation.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
Looking at the edit history, it looks like a different page was edited in. There’s a lot of funky stuff you can do there with wiki formatting and likely wasn’t a hack as said.