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Comment by segfaultbuserr | Hacker News Reader

There's a risk of phishing by editing Wikipedia articles if the plugin gets popular. Perhaps it's useful to crosscheck the current URL against the 24-hour earlier and 48-hour earlier versions of the same article. Crosscheck back in time, not back in revision, since one can spam the history by making a lot of edits.

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I jotted down some thoughts about this very thing last year. Here's the part that argues that it could work out to be fairly robust despite this apparent weakness:

> Not as trivially compromised as it sounds like it would be; could be faked with (inevitably short-lived) edits, but temporality can't be faked. If a system were rolled out tomorrow, nothing that happens after rollout [...] would alter the fact that for the last N years, Wikipedia has understood that the website for Facebook is facebook.com. Newly created, low-traffic articles and short-lived edits would fail the trust threshold. After rollout, there would be increased attention to make sure that longstanding edits getting in that misrepresent the link between domain and identity [can never reach maturity]. Would-be attackers would be discouraged to the point of not even trying.

https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may-integration.html...

I believe the German version of Wikipedia had(has?) a feature where you only get verified versions of a page when you browse it anonymously.

> I believe the German version of Wikipedia had(has?) a feature where you only get verified versions of a page when you browse it anonymously.

What’s a “verified version”? Who verifies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

Verifiability is about the ability to check some information using reliable sources ; it has nothing to do with having “verified versions” of pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes

Thanks, that’s more like this.

Nice idea! Maybe should involve some randomised offsets so it can't just be planned ahead of time

And what would you do if there was a difference?

Return an error code. Also, since the DNS protocol allows ancillary informations, perhaps return additional informations in fields that would seem fit, else in comments.

Edit: this is not DNS over wikipedia. As other pointed out, there is no DNS involved in the linked artifact. One option would be to show alternatives with dates and let user choose.

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