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.
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.