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Maniphest T9071

Pages can be edited with an oldid from another page
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Description

Author: michael.billington

Description:
When a person reverts a page (without having admin rollback), they are editing
an older version of the page. If you change the oldid in the address bar of your
browser, you can effectively copy the contents of another page onto the page you
are editing. (I'm not sure if this is good or bad) This, when combined with a
bug in a vandal-fighting programme, caused a pretty odd revision to the main page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=61168673
It can easily be replicated in my sandbox, see below link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:MichaelBillington/Sandbox&action=edit&oldid=61168415

My thinking is that it should only allow you to edit a page with an oldid from
the same page, or maybe it should give you a different banner at the top of the
page instead of the usual "You are editing a prior version of this page. If you
save it, any changes made since this version will be removed." Any thoughts?

Version: unspecified
Severity: minor
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=61168673

Details

Reference
bz7071

Event Timeline

• bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 9:25 PM
• bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-Page-editing.
• bzimport set Reference to bz7071.
• bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).
• bzimport created this task.Aug 20 2006, 1:30 AM
• bzimport added a comment.Aug 20 2006, 6:30 AM

wmahan_04 wrote:

Possible fix

Here is a fix, assuming that the new check doesn't
break any valid cases.

It raises another issue though: if a completely
bogus oldid is entered when editing a page, the
error message is displayed inside the edit form.
The page can still be saved, replacing the
article text with the error message. So the fix
probably wouldn't do anything to stop a bot gone
awry.

Attached:

7071.diff603 BDownload

• werdna added a comment.Nov 13 2006, 7:31 AM

The fix is bad. It still allows them to be edited, except instead of giving an
error message, it puts the error message IN the textbox. This is unacceptable.

• brooke added a comment.Jun 27 2007, 5:59 PM

Fixed this in r23483 (cf related issue bug 10377).

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