Vandalism on Wikipedia: Swastika attack

Wikipedia is famous for being a kind of open encyclopedia, not created by a few authors, but anyone can edit it. This often has the advantage that there is a great deal of control and that the subject is not necessarily lit from one side. However, it also comes with a significant drawback: it can also cause harmful things to appear – temporarily – on the page. Yesterday, for example, when the swastika was laid out in several pages.

Wikipedia

Apparently someone wanted to make a statement, because the pages that are being referenced a lot at the moment seem to be the victim. A malicious netizen put a swastika on a Wikipedia page about Ben Affleck, Johnny Depp and Jennifer Lopez. So it appears to be an attack targeting specific people. After all, there are also pages for “Northern Myths” or “Saucepan”. It seems that mischievous emoticons were mostly with celebrities, but this is not entirely true: tens of thousands of pages seem to have a swastika background.

It was quickly adapted, in part due to Wikipedia’s self-regulatory concept. They were only going to stay on it for five minutes, but of course it’s scary. In addition to these celebrities, Nazi icons have also been featured on the page of United States Vice President Kama Harris and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Nice volunteers

The “attacker” used a specific template to make the edit, at which point Wikipedia decided to close that template to volunteers. They told Mashable they weren’t happy to do so, as it was very different from their open communication and community strategy. It says: “This type of behavior is unacceptable on Wikipedia and violates some Wikipedia policies. Volunteer administrators have resolved the vandalism and banned the responsible account and will continue to assess the situation to see if additional compensation is needed.”

Of course this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, because it happens quite often. However, this is usually not very specific with the swastika and not on multiple pages that seem to be clearly targeted. Hopefully this is just a frustrated internet user and not someone who is actually plotting an issue with one of these celebrities and politicians.