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.
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
In most cases if a reporter (and their entire news organization!) knew something to be true but kept saying the opposite for hours, that would be malpractice.
That’s why the wording of the “correction” is important. She doesn’t say the queen isn’t dead, she says there has been no announcement.
The protocol for news reporting around the death of the monarch is there for a reason: to make sure the news is authentic and to announce it to as many subjects as possible simultaneously. I don’t think it’s unusual for a news organisation to hold back from reporting something when there is a good reason. For example, troop movements, court cases, etc.
In which case practice is appropriately to answer "no comment", not to say the opposite is true. Especially when it's obvious you're acting counter to what you're saying.
The whole thing has a cult quality to it, and it's a farce in a way even ordinary propaganda isn't - beyond embarrassment and into cringe, perhaps.
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".
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) 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".
I had no idea about Poundbury's link to CRIII. I live in Yeovil, roughly 30 miles away and I have a customer there too.
From memory it is quite different to the norm - lots of space is one impression I had. The road system is a bit different to what we expect in Britain too. Can't quite put my finger on it.
I think I might toddle on down and review the place with my eyes open.
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.
"My country, 'tis of thee" is an American song written by Samuel Francis Smith, an American Baptist Minister. Why would the UK use it as their national anthem?
Perhaps some internet sarcasm is going over my head, but the lyrics are by Samuel Francis Smith. Its melody is the same as that of "God Save the Queen/King."
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.
One thing to remember is that Wikipedia prefers free photographs. Non-free photographs can be used but the preference is towards free ones.
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.
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).
I actually think Wikipedia would benefit from way more photos. Even in this example - give me 10 different photos on the right, right below right information panel.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Major news outlets usually have a pre-prepared article for deaths of notable figures and celebrities. Then they can just fill in remaining blanks and publish quickly. On occasion one of these pre-prepared articles gets accidentally leaked, or sometimes a news outlet mistakenly thinks somebody died and runs with it.
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.)
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.
> LONDON—After 70[?] years as the ruling monarch of the United Kingdom and [CHECK HOW MANY COUNTRIES SHE’S IN CHARGE OF OR ELSE TWITTER PEDANTS WILL GET MAD] Queen Elizabeth died [PEACEFULLY OR PAINFULLY—COPY WHATEVER BBC OBIT SAYS] in [TK LOCATION] at the age of 89
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.
> 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
Such is the extent of the Angloamerican corporate propaganda that fills in the place of the state propaganda apparatus in non-capitalist systems.
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.
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). But again, I don't think enwiki would use this very much, anyway.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>Add to this is that she had no real power throughout the realm.
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.
How difficult is it to imagine that every head of state around the world, figurative or not, have a protocol attached to his/her death? I would imagine this would be true for most of the countries around the world. No?
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]
Historically there was a risk of pretenders trying to seize the thrown. And it was important to have clear continuity to avoid this. So much of what you see is about securing the new king and the queen is coincidental. Just look at the announcement message for an example of this.
"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.
> 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.
Sure. Mind is all the way open. Pointing out that a sentence doesn't make sense isn't an insult. As a foreigner in Finland, I try to speak Finnish every day. Believe me, I am well familiar with constructing nonsense and being told so.
Anyway, the military broadcasts a light? What's going on there?
Ok, so every radio station in the UK has a special light. The light is turned on whenever a royal dies. And then there is a prepared message pre-recorded by the UK military that the radio station broadcasts? How does the station know which royal died? Is the light different colors? Blink different patterns? The station calls the military?
From what I can gather a network of radio stations has pooled news bulletins and the organisation behind it provides this 'obit light' in it's members radio studios that signify someone important has died and to prepare for a bulletin, upcoming news programming will follow a certain format and the output should be changed to suit the mood.
It'd be interesting to see how it works/worked from tech point of view - perhaps some kind of long wave radio signal on the frequency that the news broadcast is sent from?
But yeah, doesn't look like a military thing or that it holds any authority
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.
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