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As I was brainstorming about the ridiculous ways I could stretch the topic of "news editing", I thought about Wikipedia and it's loose editing process. As an experiment I went in and edited the page about Stephen A. Smith to say he was born in 1968 instead of 1967. I am curious how long it will take for this to be changed back to the correct version. Of course I am not going to check it with hourly regularity so the experiment will be analyzed once a day.

I feel like Wikipedia is a copy editor's worst nightmare. The site is edited for content and punctuation by anyone who feels like signing up and editing. All I had to do was give them an email address that I hardly use and chose a user name. If you care to look me up I go under the pseudonym "MrEdits". It was MrEdits' opinion that Stephen A. Smith was born in 1968 and he has a website that proves it.

This is the even more ridiculous part about Wikipedia. Most of the time you don't really have to prove where you got your information. I would only have to cite my sources if I wanted to make a major edit to the content. But apparently a man's date of birth isn't too major.

I would be a liar if I said I haven't used Wikipedia to look up important information. I'm just saying that before you look up an illness or information for your research paper due in the morning, I would be wary about what you read on a self-editing Web site. There's a reason why things get edited by professionals and why there's the process of attribution. Those people are trained and actually know what they're talking about.

But hey, if you want to become a professional Wikipedia editor like me, just check out the Wikipedia page on Wikipedia page editing... it even has its own manual of style.

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