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Wikipedia Mobile Hacked?

2 points by sasattack ↗ HN
Did anyone else see on mobile wikipedia english yesterday that for several hours the featured article had a description that was hate speech (https://imgur.com/a/QahqKXU) before getting fixed back?

not a single source is seeming to report on it. The reason I think it might be a app hack of some type is this text did not appear on the featured article from the browser version of Wikipedia at the same time

5 comments

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LinuxBender
Hacked, or an article was changed and moderators changed it back? Did you check the revision history? Could it be a editors credentials were compromised rather than the site itself?
sasattack
There are a lot of edits deleted from the edit history so that is suspicious. however the changed text was in the description of the featured article which is on the homepage of the app. As far as I know a editor has to custom set them (as they are often slightly diffrent than the actual beginning of the article). So perhaps your thought about editor creds might make sense

edit: to clarify the reason I think it might be a app hack of some type is this text did not appear on the featured article from the browser version of Wikipedia

t-3
This is common. I've also seen edits that target the blurbs shown by search engines (google says "Timothy McVeigh was an American Hero...", article says domestic terroeist).
sasattack
can you with edits target the featured article blurb only on mobile?
t-3
I have no idea how these attacks work, I've only seen the results. Probably you would want to look at the code that creates the mobile landing page to start with.