Hackers vandalise Wikipedia pages with images of swastikas

Some of Wikipedia’s most popular pages were very briefly vandalised with pictures of swastikas after the online encyclopaedia was hacked on Monday.

The antisemitic images replaced the text and pictures briefly to a number of pages dedicated to celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, and Madonna. The entry for Joseph Stalin also briefly displayed Nazi symbols.

A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the online encyclopaedia, described the appearance of the Nazi symbols as “particularly vile” but said that the “vandalism” had been “fixed quickly” and the account responsible had been blocked.

The spokesperson told The Sun newspaper that a “wiki template…was vandalised on English Wikipedia” on the day that the alleged hack occurred. This “resulted in a Nazi flag appearing for a few minutes on a number of articles.”

She added that the vandalism was reversed “within five minutes” and that the “template was protected from additional negative behaviour…within fifteen minutes.” Wikipedia volunteers and administrators would “further evaluate the situation to see if additional recourse” was needed, she said.

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