Wikipedia engages the ‘nuclear option’ after #trump penis hack

Tech

As Wikipedia becomes more powerful, it’s facing a new vandalism problem. In recent weeks, the user-moderated online encyclopedia has experienced a string of rogue edits, most infamously when a user changed Donald Trump’s lead picture to an image of a penis, an attack that was repeated for days afterwards. Most of these edits were made from old editor accounts, which were often left unused for months or years. But the more troubling breaches came from administrator accounts, three of which have been breached in recent weeks. Admins are the rank above editor, and they do most of the actual work of maintaining Wikipedia. As a result, their accounts are more powerful, and the resulting breaches harder to clean up.

Those compromises have put…

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