Beware the Leader Who Bangs The Drums Of War…
Back when I was working at Koios Works, a video game development company, we developed a game called Tin Soldiers: Julius Caesar. As we were a small company working with a small publishers, we were responsible for developing the game as well as helping to support the marketing descriptions. As I was looking for interesting material to put on the box, I ran across this Caesar quote:
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.
And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.
How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.
It sounded really great, and it was perfect for a game on this incredible man. Unfortunately, it was totally bogus. It seems that this quote was created somewhere around the year 2000.
So, what does that have to do with the year 2009? Well, a sociology student from Ireland decided to run a little experiment across the new “media web” to see what would happen. He posted a quote on Wikipedia on the French composer Maurice Jarre’s encyclopedia page hours after the French composer’s death on March 28. This quote – which he totally made up – was attributed to Jarre and it said: “My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life.” Some facinating things followed:
- The quote, which was provided on Wikipedia with absolutely zero reference, was quoted by journalists across the globe in numerous obituaries
- Wikipedia “editors” – a large number of unpaid volunteers – quickly caught the lack of a reference and flagged the entry within minutes of its posting
- Eventually, the Wikipedia entry was cleaned since primary sources were missing
- Only the Guardian printed a correction
Lessons? Several:
- Journalists can be lazy – finding something on Wikipedia without checking for primary resources; this is the type of sloppy reporting – Dan Rather anyone? – that lowers confidence in the traditional media
- “Wisdom of the crowd” works! The editors of Wikipedia were able to quickly spot the fraud and take corrective action almost right away
- Newspapers better look out; as Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post finally embraced in his article yesterday, printed newspaper is a dinosaur – experiments like this show why dynamic information flow is so much stronger than one-way.
