Some idiot filled thousands of Wikipedia pages with swastikas

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Earlier this week, some idiot vandalized a bunch of Wikipedia pages. For a few minutes on Monday morning, more than 50,000 Wikipedia pages were littered with black and white swastikas over a bright red background.

According to a new report from Gizmodo, this particular hacker took advantage of a flaw in the website’s security measures. Instead of looking at individual pages and content, this loser was able to alter a template that was used for all 50,00 plus pages. Many popular pages, such as those of President Biden and actor Joel McHale, were affected by this attack.

Wikipedia’s group of in-house moderators are usually pretty good about identifying and correcting acts of vandalism like this, but this particular hacker was able to exploit an unknown flaw in the site’s security. Generally, more popular templates have certain protections built in that stop them from potential vandalism. However, this particular template lacked those protections, until now.

Hey is anyone else getting a swastika when trying to look up some actor's @Wikipedia pages…. It's happened with a couple we've tried but here is (to my knowledge) not Nazi @joelmchale pic.twitter.com/rdMoS1ML3T

— Veev (@vivluvsdiscostu) August 16, 2021

As of now, all of the pages originally affected have been fixed, thanks to swift action from Wikipedia’s admins. Admins have also found the user responsible and banned them indefinitely from the platform.

It’s not really surprising to see something like this happen to Wikipedia. In fact, I’m surprised we don’t hear about more of this kind of vandalism on the site, considering anybody can technically update a Wikipedia page. It seems like the site just has a great group of admins that keep things clean, and they certainly acted swiftly with this one.

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