10 ms·

What went down on Wikipedia after Queen Elizabeth II's death was announced

233 points by raybb 4y ago

netsharc 4y ago
It'd be interesting if Wikipedia had a git-style interface where someone can just "git push" and hundreds of articles get updated (any one that mentions The Queen, Prince Charles, even Harry's children now get Prince and Princess titles.
- raybb 4y ago
  That would be pretty cool. As far as I know the closest they have are bots but the bots mostly do super simple things. Then other less common tasks people will write their own little tool for to go manually fixup all the instances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mormegil 4y ago
  It's not a problem of git, but a problem of abstraction and modularization, isn't it. In principle, this is partly doable with Wikidata (or old-school templates), e.g. some information in infoboxes and country flags are retrieved from a central location and by editing this single location, you'd change the relevant information on all pages simultaneously. However, use of such abstractions is fairly limited (especially usage of Wikidata on enwiki), basically country flags and similar are the only such usage, I'd say. In the future, this exact problem is one the primary goals of the Abstract Wikipedia project (see https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia). But again, I don't think enwiki would use this very much, anyway.
dmd 4y ago
I'm the person who updated Template:English,_Scottish_and_British_monarchs to include Charles III. Yay, I'm part of history now!
- turingwhat 4y ago
akolbe 4y ago
Proper write-up by the Depths-of-Wiki lady here: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wikipedia-updates https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wi... Copied by Gizmodo and Metro: https://gizmodo.com/queen-elizabeth-ii-died-wikipedia-deaditors-charles-1849516945 https://gizmodo.com/queen-elizabeth-ii-died-wikipedia-deadit... https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/09/how-wikipedia-responded-when-news-of-the-queens-death-broke-17335549/ https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/09/how-wikipedia-responded-when-...
- Oarch 4y ago
  With all the times the Internet has declared her dead over the years, the deaditors must be used to false starts.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
jrockway 4y ago
I was perusing Wikipedia as the news broke and was most amused how quickly the national anthem changed from "God save the queen" to "God save the king". But, the filename and "subtitles" still referred to the queen. I checked today, and indeed the file has been renamed and the embedded lyrics have been updated. Very impressive, honestly. I hope there's a third version of that sound file floating around where it claims to be "My country, 'tis of thee".
- Hamuko 4y ago
  I was also pretty impressed at the speed of which edits were being added. I opened the Poundbury article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury) and even though the news had just broken and it was a tangentially related article, the opening paragraph already said "keen endorsement of Charles, King of the United Kingdom".
  - akolbe 4y ago
    All the more remarkable is that all of this is done by unpaid volunteers.
    - Denvercoder9 4y ago
      Changing mentions of Charles, Prince of Wales to Charles, King of the United Kingdom seems like something that's easily automated though. I highly doubt someone manually went searching for pages that mentioned him to update them.
      - akolbe 4y ago
        The two people who changed it in the Poundbury article only changed it there, and nowhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=1109226533&oldid=1094823375 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=11... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Grahame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Grahame https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=next&oldid=1109226533 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=ne... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/81.231.10.34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/81.231.1...
Macha 4y ago
The discussion on photos seems strange to me. Obviously I'm not fully up to date on wikipedia policies, but the comparisons to Reagan or actors using photos from their prime rather than their later years seems a bit misleading. US presidents and actors both are much less active at the end of their life to the peak of their age so people remember what they looked like at that peak (I remember being surprised at W's current appearance in his post-election video with Obama and Clinton), but the Queen was active and old for a long time. Similarly, even on actors, I'd kind of expect a photo of an older Morgan Freeman or Ian McKellen to continue to be their picture even post-mortem, while I wouldn't expect the same for, for example, Mark Hamill.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  Interesting. If we posit that the age representation on Wikipedia someway not only reflects but perpetuates the "normal" canonical age of someone's memory, then we might ask if they need to follow neutrality policies (random age in pictures) or try to find sources for what ages are used commonly elsewhere.
- kibwen 4y ago
  If you look at the article right now, they appear to have agreed with you, as they're using a photo from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II
  - Denvercoder9 4y ago
    That is the photo that was on the article before her dead; the discussion on whether it should be changed, and if so to what, it is still ongoing.
    - Nition 4y ago
      In fact it has changed again in the last 45 minutes, as it's showing a photo from 1959 now.
      - 4y ago
ClassyJacket 4y ago
The girl that runs this account, Anne Rauwerda, is great. I only just found out she has a twitter account after watching her on tiktok for a long time. Apparently she does live shows even! You can tell she really loves talking about these topics, she seems to really enjoy herself. Her coverage of the death of Elizabeth II has been no exception.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  I've logged out of twitter (cut distractions) but that's a reminder that there is some value out there :)
blondin 4y ago
the general news media was very impressive to me as well. i hardly knew the queen. but within hours were many articles and documentaries covering her lifetime. i had this sad nagging feeling that they had them ready for the moment. and things would have been different if the situation was not expected. i learned so much about her in the following hours...
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I would expect them to have something done as they have had what 70 years plus to prepare for this eventuality. And it is not that the things change too much with her.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  Large news outlets generally have these sort of obituaries prepared for all relevant heads of state, famous actors or authors, etc. That’s why occasionally they will declare someone dead who’s very much alive, because the publish flag on the article accidentally got set.
  - yesbabyyes 4y ago
    Believe it or not, this is the back story of the Nobel Prize. A Parisian newspaper published Alfred Nobel's obituary and, as he wasn't dead, he read it. It wasn't very flattering, to say the least; I believe it began something like: The merchant of Death is dead. This experience made him take a deep look at his life and legacy, and he decided to will his fortune to the development of science, peace and literature.
    - chki 4y ago
      While that is a nice story, there are apparently not many actual records supporting this. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43461/is-there-any-record-of-the-premature-obituary-of-alfred-nobel https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43461/is-there-a...
      - 4y ago
ordu 4y ago
It is sad when people die, and I'm feeling guilty laughing at people fighting for the right to write history at the same speed it happens.
sdssdfsdf1 4y ago
AlbertCory 4y ago
In the bad old days of Big Newspaper, they had pre-written obituaries for all the famous people who might die. Henry Kissinger is 99 years old. Jimmy Carter is almost 98. It would be journalistic malpractice not to have their obits all ready.
- glandium 4y ago
  I don't know why you say that in past tense. They still do.
  - boyter 4y ago
    Can confirm. I have previously done work for a broadcaster and they have packages ready to go for most older famous people. If not a package a collection of media ready to be cut into one.
- underwater 4y ago
  This is still common today. They also run fire drills on a regular basis for major figures.
  - indrora 4y ago
    There's been fire drills inside the BBC for the queen for years: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
- davidjohnstone 4y ago
  The New York Times' article on her life has a couple of corrections for things that look like they were written earlier and not updated with the latest when published. For example: > The earlier version misstated at one point the length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was seven decades, not “almost seven decades.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizab...
- deleted 4y ago
keepquestioning 4y ago
The interesting part of this is the fact that every radio station is required to a special light that turns on when a Royal dies and this is broadcast throughout the UK by the military. The UK has a weird, self-important, order-centric hierarchical culture. Even down to the fact this event had a codename pre-planned in advance. "London Bridge has fallen".. just, why? This isn't James Bond. This is the real world, she's an old lady that everyone knows will die. Add to this is that she had no real power throughout the realm.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Probably because mismanaged transitions are very, very embarrassing. I think of how the only American President to take the oath of office on a Catholic missal was Lyndon Johnson - who mistook Kennedys missal for a Bible. Not the biggest thing in the world - but people are watching and problems will be magnified out of proportion and talked about for centuries. Nobody wants to be played as an incompetent civil servant in a Netflix tv show 50 years from now.
  - krallja 4y ago
    Faithfully… https://www.npr.org/2013/01/18/169739324/obamas-first-oath-of-office-remembered-as-less-than-smooth https://www.npr.org/2013/01/18/169739324/obamas-first-oath-o...
- megablast 4y ago
  > The interesting part of this is the fact that every radio station is required to a special light that turns on when a Royal dies and this is broadcast throughout the UK by the military. This sentence makes no sense.
  - rendall 4y ago
    Yes. It's almost genius. "required to a special light"? "this is broadcast... by the military"?
    - 4y ago
IndigoIncognito 4y ago
The real sauce was on the [Dead] comments on the HN post about her death
jackconsidine 4y ago
If you ever see the midnight premiere of a new movie you may be in for a treat. Assuming the film wasn't screened elsewhere already, really rough plot edits usually roll in right afterwards. Recently I saw the movie Nope not realizing it was the premiere and had this experience. If anyone's curious here's the version I read right after [0]. Since then I've tried to go backwards on articles and see them in their original forms. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nope_(film)&oldid=1099781708 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nope_(film)&oldid...
thowerio34234 4y ago
[flagged]
eevilspock 4y ago
How does the wiki engine handle concurrent edits, i.e. the inevitable merge conflicts that will result from so many people editing at the same time?
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  It's well documented, and effectively simple merge conflict resolution ala any version control system allowing for simultaneous edits. Wikipedia, however, does not perform any automatic merging. Any concurrent change must be resolved.
y5y5y5jjjj 4y ago
d1sxeyes 4y ago
Most of us knew in advance that she had died because we recognised parts of the protocol. The big news anchors called in early and wearing black suits and TV schedules suspended until 6pm, road signage removed from the front gate at Balmoral and fences put up, parliament suspended, the whole Royal family travelling to Scotland… plus a BBC journalist accidentally announcing it at 3pm on Twitter and then giving the most cagily worded retraction I’ve ever read: “I tweeted that there had been an announcement about the death of the Queen. This was incorrect, there has been no announcement, and so I have deleted the tweet. I apologise.” Personally, I was pretty sure she was gone two to three hours before the formal announcement. Plenty of time to do quite a lot of Wikipedia updates and just click “Save” when the announcement finally breaks.
- philjohn 4y ago
  This. The moment Huw Edwards appeared wearing a black suit and tie it was obvious.
- mattlondon 4y ago
  Yeah the whole royal family going there en masse and simultaneously (even on the same plane in some cases) says to me she died sometime before the announcement so that the royals themselves got some semblance of a chance to deal with it and process it themselves privately first before it literally being the only thing in UK media for the next 20 days. My bet is that not long after she met with the PM. She had two birthdays (personal and official) so two dates of death doesn't seem so far fetched
  - dmurray 4y ago
    More like 20 birthdays. Each of the dozens of territories she ruled over finds its own convenient time for a local celebration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Official_Birthday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Official_Birthday (also an example of a page in flux, with about half the references updated to refer to the king instead of a queen).
  - djhworld 4y ago
    I read somewhere that the PM was informed of her death around 4:30pm. At least from the official statements it mentions she died in the afternoon.
alrlroipsp 4y ago
Proper pageviews analytics; https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2022-07-01&end=2022-09-08&pages=Ding-Dong!_The_Witch_Is_Dead https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...
SilverBirch 4y ago
I think we can all agree it’s quite unimportant for Wikipedia to be microsecond up to date, and the people obsessed with being “first” probably don’t have the best reasons for wanting to be first. I wonder if they would just be better off locking pages, doing a collaborative period where changes can be debated, and then wholesale applied, rather than have this mess.
- thenoblesunfish 4y ago
  Ultimately not important, but then again people read the page on record numbers when the news breaks, so there is some time sensitivity.
- arinlen 4y ago
  > I think we can all agree it’s quite unimportant for Wikipedia to be microsecond up to date, and the people (...) I don't understand your comment. The only concrete grievance you have is that you feel some hypothetical people who you depict as being obsessed with being first might not have "the best reasons", and based on your personal suspicion your suggestion is to lock pages? Supposedly that's a very last resort thing for a wiki, whose whole purpose and responsibility is to let communities freely edit articles as their feel like it. Why exactly do you feel it's desirable to subvert the whole point of a wiki?
  - SilverBirch 4y ago
    Well firstly, I don't think I'm suggesting we "subvert the whole point of wikipedia" or atleast, if that's what I'm suggesting, that the hierarchical moderation system of wikipedia has already done that. What I'm saying is that if your goal is to have an accurate record, then you want to disincentivize drive-by edits, and incentivize high qualtiy content. This sort of rush of "is-was" replacement is the definition of low quality. It adds nothing of value to the article, but muddies up the history of the edits. It has real implications, by definition any first edit is going to have to source news articles that have a speed-to-publish bias, rather than a requirement for quality for example. There's nothing the speed gives you other than a fight over nothing of value. So why not just... not?

233 points by raybb 4y ago

It'd be interesting if Wikipedia had a git-style interface where someone can just "git push" and hundreds of articles get updated (any one that mentions The Queen, Prince Charles, even Harry's children now get Prince and Princess titles.

raybb 4y ago
That would be pretty cool. As far as I know the closest they have are bots but the bots mostly do super simple things. Then other less common tasks people will write their own little tool for to go manually fixup all the instances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mormegil 4y ago
It's not a problem of git, but a problem of abstraction and modularization, isn't it. In principle, this is partly doable with Wikidata (or old-school templates), e.g. some information in infoboxes and country flags are retrieved from a central location and by editing this single location, you'd change the relevant information on all pages simultaneously. However, use of such abstractions is fairly limited (especially usage of Wikidata on enwiki), basically country flags and similar are the only such usage, I'd say. In the future, this exact problem is one the primary goals of the Abstract Wikipedia project (see https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia). But again, I don't think enwiki would use this very much, anyway.

dmd 4y ago

I'm the person who updated Template:English,_Scottish_and_British_monarchs to include Charles III. Yay, I'm part of history now!

turingwhat 4y ago

akolbe 4y ago

Proper write-up by the Depths-of-Wiki lady here: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wikipedia-updates https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wi... Copied by Gizmodo and Metro: https://gizmodo.com/queen-elizabeth-ii-died-wikipedia-deaditors-charles-1849516945 https://gizmodo.com/queen-elizabeth-ii-died-wikipedia-deadit... https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/09/how-wikipedia-responded-when-news-of-the-queens-death-broke-17335549/ https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/09/how-wikipedia-responded-when-...

Oarch 4y ago
With all the times the Internet has declared her dead over the years, the deaditors must be used to false starts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jrockway 4y ago

I was perusing Wikipedia as the news broke and was most amused how quickly the national anthem changed from "God save the queen" to "God save the king". But, the filename and "subtitles" still referred to the queen. I checked today, and indeed the file has been renamed and the embedded lyrics have been updated. Very impressive, honestly. I hope there's a third version of that sound file floating around where it claims to be "My country, 'tis of thee".

Hamuko 4y ago
I was also pretty impressed at the speed of which edits were being added. I opened the Poundbury article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury) and even though the news had just broken and it was a tangentially related article, the opening paragraph already said "keen endorsement of Charles, King of the United Kingdom".
- akolbe 4y ago
  All the more remarkable is that all of this is done by unpaid volunteers.
  - Denvercoder9 4y ago
    Changing mentions of Charles, Prince of Wales to Charles, King of the United Kingdom seems like something that's easily automated though. I highly doubt someone manually went searching for pages that mentioned him to update them.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      The two people who changed it in the Poundbury article only changed it there, and nowhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=1109226533&oldid=1094823375 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=11... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Grahame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Grahame https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=next&oldid=1109226533 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poundbury&diff=ne... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/81.231.10.34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/81.231.1...

Macha 4y ago

The discussion on photos seems strange to me. Obviously I'm not fully up to date on wikipedia policies, but the comparisons to Reagan or actors using photos from their prime rather than their later years seems a bit misleading. US presidents and actors both are much less active at the end of their life to the peak of their age so people remember what they looked like at that peak (I remember being surprised at W's current appearance in his post-election video with Obama and Clinton), but the Queen was active and old for a long time. Similarly, even on actors, I'd kind of expect a photo of an older Morgan Freeman or Ian McKellen to continue to be their picture even post-mortem, while I wouldn't expect the same for, for example, Mark Hamill.

AlecSchueler 4y ago
Interesting. If we posit that the age representation on Wikipedia someway not only reflects but perpetuates the "normal" canonical age of someone's memory, then we might ask if they need to follow neutrality policies (random age in pictures) or try to find sources for what ages are used commonly elsewhere.
kibwen 4y ago
If you look at the article right now, they appear to have agreed with you, as they're using a photo from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II
- Denvercoder9 4y ago
  That is the photo that was on the article before her dead; the discussion on whether it should be changed, and if so to what, it is still ongoing.
  - Nition 4y ago
    In fact it has changed again in the last 45 minutes, as it's showing a photo from 1959 now.
    - 4y ago

ClassyJacket 4y ago

The girl that runs this account, Anne Rauwerda, is great. I only just found out she has a twitter account after watching her on tiktok for a long time. Apparently she does live shows even! You can tell she really loves talking about these topics, she seems to really enjoy herself. Her coverage of the death of Elizabeth II has been no exception.

kzrdude 4y ago
I've logged out of twitter (cut distractions) but that's a reminder that there is some value out there :)

blondin 4y ago

the general news media was very impressive to me as well. i hardly knew the queen. but within hours were many articles and documentaries covering her lifetime. i had this sad nagging feeling that they had them ready for the moment. and things would have been different if the situation was not expected. i learned so much about her in the following hours...

Ekaros 4y ago
I would expect them to have something done as they have had what 70 years plus to prepare for this eventuality. And it is not that the things change too much with her.
Swenrekcah 4y ago
Large news outlets generally have these sort of obituaries prepared for all relevant heads of state, famous actors or authors, etc. That’s why occasionally they will declare someone dead who’s very much alive, because the publish flag on the article accidentally got set.
- yesbabyyes 4y ago
  Believe it or not, this is the back story of the Nobel Prize. A Parisian newspaper published Alfred Nobel's obituary and, as he wasn't dead, he read it. It wasn't very flattering, to say the least; I believe it began something like: The merchant of Death is dead. This experience made him take a deep look at his life and legacy, and he decided to will his fortune to the development of science, peace and literature.
  - chki 4y ago
    While that is a nice story, there are apparently not many actual records supporting this. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43461/is-there-any-record-of-the-premature-obituary-of-alfred-nobel https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43461/is-there-a...
    - 4y ago

ordu 4y ago

It is sad when people die, and I'm feeling guilty laughing at people fighting for the right to write history at the same speed it happens.

sdssdfsdf1 4y ago

AlbertCory 4y ago

In the bad old days of Big Newspaper, they had pre-written obituaries for all the famous people who might die. Henry Kissinger is 99 years old. Jimmy Carter is almost 98. It would be journalistic malpractice not to have their obits all ready.

glandium 4y ago
I don't know why you say that in past tense. They still do.
- boyter 4y ago
  Can confirm. I have previously done work for a broadcaster and they have packages ready to go for most older famous people. If not a package a collection of media ready to be cut into one.
underwater 4y ago
This is still common today. They also run fire drills on a regular basis for major figures.
- indrora 4y ago
  There's been fire drills inside the BBC for the queen for years: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens-when-queen-elizabeth-dies-london-bridge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
davidjohnstone 4y ago
The New York Times' article on her life has a couple of corrections for things that look like they were written earlier and not updated with the latest when published. For example: > The earlier version misstated at one point the length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was seven decades, not “almost seven decades.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizab...
deleted 4y ago

keepquestioning 4y ago

The interesting part of this is the fact that every radio station is required to a special light that turns on when a Royal dies and this is broadcast throughout the UK by the military. The UK has a weird, self-important, order-centric hierarchical culture. Even down to the fact this event had a codename pre-planned in advance. "London Bridge has fallen".. just, why? This isn't James Bond. This is the real world, she's an old lady that everyone knows will die. Add to this is that she had no real power throughout the realm.

pyuser583 4y ago
Probably because mismanaged transitions are very, very embarrassing. I think of how the only American President to take the oath of office on a Catholic missal was Lyndon Johnson - who mistook Kennedys missal for a Bible. Not the biggest thing in the world - but people are watching and problems will be magnified out of proportion and talked about for centuries. Nobody wants to be played as an incompetent civil servant in a Netflix tv show 50 years from now.
- krallja 4y ago
  Faithfully… https://www.npr.org/2013/01/18/169739324/obamas-first-oath-of-office-remembered-as-less-than-smooth https://www.npr.org/2013/01/18/169739324/obamas-first-oath-o...
megablast 4y ago
> The interesting part of this is the fact that every radio station is required to a special light that turns on when a Royal dies and this is broadcast throughout the UK by the military. This sentence makes no sense.
- rendall 4y ago
  Yes. It's almost genius. "required to a special light"? "this is broadcast... by the military"?
  - 4y ago

IndigoIncognito 4y ago

The real sauce was on the [Dead] comments on the HN post about her death

jackconsidine 4y ago

If you ever see the midnight premiere of a new movie you may be in for a treat. Assuming the film wasn't screened elsewhere already, really rough plot edits usually roll in right afterwards. Recently I saw the movie Nope not realizing it was the premiere and had this experience. If anyone's curious here's the version I read right after [0]. Since then I've tried to go backwards on articles and see them in their original forms. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nope_(film)&oldid=1099781708 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nope_(film)&oldid...

thowerio34234 4y ago

[flagged]

eevilspock 4y ago

How does the wiki engine handle concurrent edits, i.e. the inevitable merge conflicts that will result from so many people editing at the same time?

xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
It's well documented, and effectively simple merge conflict resolution ala any version control system allowing for simultaneous edits. Wikipedia, however, does not perform any automatic merging. Any concurrent change must be resolved.

y5y5y5jjjj 4y ago

d1sxeyes 4y ago

Most of us knew in advance that she had died because we recognised parts of the protocol. The big news anchors called in early and wearing black suits and TV schedules suspended until 6pm, road signage removed from the front gate at Balmoral and fences put up, parliament suspended, the whole Royal family travelling to Scotland… plus a BBC journalist accidentally announcing it at 3pm on Twitter and then giving the most cagily worded retraction I’ve ever read: “I tweeted that there had been an announcement about the death of the Queen. This was incorrect, there has been no announcement, and so I have deleted the tweet. I apologise.” Personally, I was pretty sure she was gone two to three hours before the formal announcement. Plenty of time to do quite a lot of Wikipedia updates and just click “Save” when the announcement finally breaks.

philjohn 4y ago
This. The moment Huw Edwards appeared wearing a black suit and tie it was obvious.
mattlondon 4y ago
Yeah the whole royal family going there en masse and simultaneously (even on the same plane in some cases) says to me she died sometime before the announcement so that the royals themselves got some semblance of a chance to deal with it and process it themselves privately first before it literally being the only thing in UK media for the next 20 days. My bet is that not long after she met with the PM. She had two birthdays (personal and official) so two dates of death doesn't seem so far fetched
- dmurray 4y ago
  More like 20 birthdays. Each of the dozens of territories she ruled over finds its own convenient time for a local celebration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Official_Birthday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Official_Birthday (also an example of a page in flux, with about half the references updated to refer to the king instead of a queen).
- djhworld 4y ago
  I read somewhere that the PM was informed of her death around 4:30pm. At least from the official statements it mentions she died in the afternoon.

alrlroipsp 4y ago

Proper pageviews analytics; https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2022-07-01&end=2022-09-08&pages=Ding-Dong!_The_Witch_Is_Dead https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&plat...

SilverBirch 4y ago

I think we can all agree it’s quite unimportant for Wikipedia to be microsecond up to date, and the people obsessed with being “first” probably don’t have the best reasons for wanting to be first. I wonder if they would just be better off locking pages, doing a collaborative period where changes can be debated, and then wholesale applied, rather than have this mess.

thenoblesunfish 4y ago
Ultimately not important, but then again people read the page on record numbers when the news breaks, so there is some time sensitivity.
arinlen 4y ago
> I think we can all agree it’s quite unimportant for Wikipedia to be microsecond up to date, and the people (...) I don't understand your comment. The only concrete grievance you have is that you feel some hypothetical people who you depict as being obsessed with being first might not have "the best reasons", and based on your personal suspicion your suggestion is to lock pages? Supposedly that's a very last resort thing for a wiki, whose whole purpose and responsibility is to let communities freely edit articles as their feel like it. Why exactly do you feel it's desirable to subvert the whole point of a wiki?
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Well firstly, I don't think I'm suggesting we "subvert the whole point of wikipedia" or atleast, if that's what I'm suggesting, that the hierarchical moderation system of wikipedia has already done that. What I'm saying is that if your goal is to have an accurate record, then you want to disincentivize drive-by edits, and incentivize high qualtiy content. This sort of rush of "is-was" replacement is the definition of low quality. It adds nothing of value to the article, but muddies up the history of the edits. It has real implications, by definition any first edit is going to have to source news articles that have a speed-to-publish bias, rather than a requirement for quality for example. There's nothing the speed gives you other than a fight over nothing of value. So why not just... not?