Brazilian magazine commits vandalism, writes about it
A major Brazilian newsweekly published an overview of Wikipedia last week that shed doubt on Wikipedia's reliability. The reporter tested this by vandalizing Wikipedia and noting that the vandalism went uncorrected for two days.
As reported by JoaoRicardo and Redux, the Brazilian magazine Veja published an article about Wikipedia on its website Sunday, and also in its print edition dated 26 January. The article noted that the freedom to edit pages gives rise to Wikipedia's success, but also characterized this as a flaw because it makes content vulnerable to malicious or ill-informed editors.
In the article, the reporter claimed to have inserted (and later removed) factually incorrect information in the Wikipedia article about Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as "Lula". This type of misinformation is commonly known as sneaky vandalism. A few individuals have previously published their results from attempts to test Wikipedia using a similar approach, notably University of Buffalo professor Alex Halavais.
Publication of the article prompted a flurry of additional edits to Lula's Wikipedia biography, both in English and Portuguese. However, although the Veja article was written in Portuguese, the vandalism was done to the article located on the English Wikipedia.