Global events are often mirrored on their respective Wikipedia pages within minutes of their occurrence.
When the Queen died, an army of volunteers guarding the “Free Encyclopedia” was mobilized and kept up to date.
The first edits to the Queen’s Wikipedia page came within minutes of the first source reporting the news.
Over the next 15 minutes, over 55 changes were made to Her Majesty’s recording. For example, change verbs to past tense.
The entire process is documented in a lovely thread on the Wikipedia Twitter account.
Wikipedia editors often compete to be the first to update the page after a celebrity’s death.
When her publicist announced Aretha Franklin’s death in 2018, it took 12 minutes to update and embed the Wikipedia article.
Yesterday, this gap was closed to two minutes. The real Twitter account posted the news at 6:30 p.m., and at 6:32 p.m., Wikipedia had its first editions.
According to a Twitter thread, Wikipedia editor Sydwhunte has “bragging rights” to get the former.
From there, an informal “working group” of editors was created to attempt to create, update, or moderate the required articles.
For example, an article about Prince Charles was changed five times while the Internet waited for his official title to be revealed.
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After that, we continue to monitor changes from anonymous editors around the world.
In 2018, blogger and Wikipedia editor Hey Kranen measured posthumous article editing to find out who was doing it.
The number of edited articles is summarized by month. Looking at this plot, you will realize that for Wikipedia, your death is the most important event in your life,” he wrote.
Only 3 of the 26 edit histories spiked at different times. Some are constant editors (like Stephen Hawking). As with any compilation, there are significant differences between “Death Peak” and the others. Because sometimes death was unexpected (Cranberries famous Dolores O’Riordan). Sometimes it is because little happened in the last years of their lives (Barbara Bush).
“Who would edit a Wikipedia article so quickly when a celebrity dies? The answer seems to be: a very diverse set of people, often anonymous, surprisingly often with a smartphone. It’s from
Mr. Kranen can’t say why these people exist. Probably because the edits are being recorded and some users can do it to their happiness.
he wrote:
The queen is said to have died peacefully at her bedside in Balmoral, Scotland, with the current King Charles and Princess Anne.
The family, including Princes William, Harry and Edward, sadly missed the opportunity to say goodbye in person, according to the report.
The country entered a formal period of mourning that lasted seven days after the funeral.
Source: Metro
I’m Jeffery Bryant, and I’m an experienced author specializing in automobile news. For the past several years, I have been working as a writer in a well-known news website. During this time, I’ve written hundreds of articles covering automotive trends and developments both nationally and internationally.