Last week on the morning of Monday, March 10, while I was on a call, I received a CNN Breaking News text message that stated there were allegations of Eliot Spitzer being linked to a prostitution ring. Huh? Wasn’t this the guy whose personal brand illuminated attributes of integrity and accountability? Maybe I was thinking of someone else. I was as confused as I would have been if John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted had been charged with kidnapping. I just couldn’t connect the dots.  My call quickly wrapped up and finished less than five minutes after I received the text message. I immediately went to Wikipedia to research Spitzer to see if I had crossed wires in my head and was possibly thinking of the wrong guy. I typed “Eliot Spitzer” in the search box and within a second had the “article” (think profile) for Eliot Laurence Spitzer, the Governor of New York. The last line of the opening paragraph read “He was linked in a Prostitution Ring scandal as announced on March 10, 2008.” Holy cow! Less than five minutes after the story broke, Spitzer’s Wikipedia profile had been updated to include the prostitution allegations. Yikes! Do you remember the days when people used to wonder how someone would be portrayed in the history books? Stop wondering. History is being captured real time on sites like Wikipedia. It’s been a week since the Eliot Spitzer story broke. Since then over one thousand updates/edits have been posted on Spitzer’s Wikipedia page. The closing line now states “March 2008, The New York Times reported that he was a customer of a prostitution ring under investigation by the federal government. On March 12, 2008, Spitzer announced his resignation as governor of New York, effective March 17, citing private failings.”  Clearly Spitzer’s “quickie” will be kept alive forever in his wiki.

Where do you think history will be defined? Through books or through wikis?

Tweet This Post