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

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

The availability of free photographs varies a lot. Often the best source for politicians is when they meet the US President, since photos by the White House photographer (and other federal employees) are public Domain (simplification).

eg the Photograph on King Charles' Wikipedia page is a White House photo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_III#/media/File:Charle...

Apart from the US Government it is often hard to get "free" photographs from earlier than 2000. Cameras were less common and those that took photographs were/are not uploading them to the Internet under a free license (and they won't age into Public Domain for many years).

For many things and topics there are too few photos (and maps, for that matter), often it’s easier to go to other sources if you want to learn about something visually. I.e. “how this historical building looks?”, and “where is this town?” both are not answered well by Wikipedia.

There is an SNL segment with Dana Carvey where he plays Tom Brokaw pre-taping all sorts of variations of Gerald Ford dying. (Dying at 83, 84, shot dead, overdose on crack, chopped by plane propeller, eaten by wolves, mauled by lion in convenience store.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tX6jdoruH8

That’s why occasionally they will declare someone dead who’s very much alive, because the publish flag on the article accidentally got set.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/20...

Such is the extent of the Angloamerican corporate propaganda that fills in the place of the state propaganda apparatus in non-capitalist systems.

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). But again, I don't think enwiki would use this very much, anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots

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?

> 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-elizab...

https://www.theonion.com/note-do-not-run-until-fucking-queen...

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.

Theoretically, it's to avoid jumping the gun. It's embarrassing if someone hears "the Queen is dead" and rushes to trigger the various announcements. There's a lot of queens in the world and in fiction -- this might be an unlikely mixup, but it's probably still better avoided.

That said, picking a phrase that's part of a well-known nursery rhyme probably didn't really help avoid that confusion.

It's in the Royal Family's interest that you believe that, and they have very good marketing. Unfortunately it is not the case. In fact the monarch gets effective veto power over almost any law, which they use to secretly negotiate favorable changes to the law, including generous exceptions to tax and labor laws.

It's simply naive to think that such a privileged and wealthy family, with such intimate connections to the machinery of government, who almost within living memory openly wielded genuine executive power and never explicitly relinquished it, does not still retain some of it.

The different between the Queen, and the rest is, her plan has been discovered and published by the mass media, and eventually online.

> broadcast throughout the UK by the military. No it is not, for non-BBC, the obituary light is not only for the Queen, but the Royal family, and other major national/international figures. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Radio_News#Obituar...

"The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon.

The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow."

The important bit is the second sentence where they proclaim Charles as king. And within 24hrs the key figures will have made an oath to him.

Also, prepping for this kind of thing is a good task for a slow day.

This sentence makes no sense.