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That's all fine and dandy, but why does it matter? This is not some sort of personal messaging, banking or financial transactions that we're talking about; this is literally an online resource where any anonymous user can come and edit anything they please without any sort of authentication or peer review whatsoever — on English Wikipedia, all edits are immediately shown to all subsequent visitors/readers, even the vandalism made by anonymous users, which on some articles goes undetected for months or even years at a time, especially in cases where the vandalism is subtle-enough.

Put it simply, it's literally a big dump of unverified information, even if some of it appears to be relatively reliable and of good quality most of the time; how is preventing me from accessing it from my iPad or Android magically makes it so great and "secure"? Don't they have any bigger problems to worry about?

And what does PCI-DSS compliance has to do with an encyclopaedia? How does it benefit Wikipedia from being PCI-DSS compliant? What's next — is Wikipedia going to adopt EDD-KYC, too?




Yeah, I mostly agree.

The most sensitive thing on Wikipedia I would think is the passwords. People often reuse passwords, so a password stolen from Wikipedia could maybe be reused against the victim's email or bank account.

Another possible sensitive item is the mapping of a username to an email. If there's an edit or account that a government doesn't like, that government might want to find what email is associated with the account, and then use information on that email to arrest the person. (Email accounts often contain phone numbers.) This reminds me of this comment[1], in which a vulnerability in Twitter allowed the Chinese government to map a username to a phone number, and then use that phone number to arrest the person.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874040


They accept credit card donations on the site.


No, they don't.

There's only one link for words "donate", and it leads to https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserRedirect..., which is an entirely different site from en.wikipedia.org.

Or are you saying there's something in PCI-DSS that would prohibit creating a link from an insecure website to a secure one?




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