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.
Looking at the revision history, it looks like it was vandalized and then reverted five minutes later (and the vandalizing editor was blocked from making edits).
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
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.
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.
Does that mean editors can insert arbitrary html/css?
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.
Ah. I had always assumed the text formatting was limited to specific options in a “rich text” type editor. Thanks for this explanation.
What a way to mark oneself as “not a child” who is “ready for certain topics”. Bless the Wikipedia volunteers.
Not a big surprise that the US election article for the current election gets vandalised…
True, but at the same time I’ve rarely ever seen any vandalism, let alone a full page takeover.
Wikipedia editors are really good at catching these things, you just happened to open the page at the exact “right” time.
As soon (2026-11-04T14:15Z) as I stumbled upon this thread, I tried to access a (not so) random article, and it seems like Wikipedia is functioning normally:
It’s like when Neelix became obsessed with boobs but with less boobs
I just watched that episode of Tor’s Cabinet
