A few hours after the official announcement of the death of Queen Elizabeth II by the BBC, the “dead” of Wikipedia were at their keyboards, ready to edit. Who will write the date of death first? The editorial war was on.
Announcing such an event first, you can’t miss it. Hours and minutes pass, the Queen’s Wikipedia page is in high demand. As a result, some sydwhunte was the first to draw at 7:30 p.m., seconds after he BBC. This was observed by the Twitter account Depths of Wikipedia, which lists this battle in a humorous way.
On the French Wikipedia page, the editing war was fierce, long before death. The death of the queen was announced before the press and changed several times. According to the observations of Boardthe pseudo vincent posted the death of the Queen at 4:42 pm The mod is calmly canceled by another user. Then try again less than an hour later for Chief Kawasaki, the change is cleared again.
“Wikipedia has administrators”, as they explain to Tech&Co Pierre-Yves Baudoin contributor to the French Wikipedia and administrator of the Wikimedia association. So sensitive mods like the Queen’s, can be set to only be modded by certain accounts. Thus, for the French-speaking Wikipedia, a certain maxfr03 officially edited the death of the Queen at 7:32 pm
The stakes are high for taxpayers, as the Queen’s English Wikipedia page was viewed 8.6 million times on the day of her death, up from 36,000 the previous day. Another striking example of the genre for Wikipedia, in 2009 when Michael Jackson died, visitors flocked to the singer’s page to such an extent that the site became saturated.
The very principle of Wikipedia is that nanyone can edit and some collaborators are very active. Sometimes it even seems like a competition between them. The “deaditors”, contraction of English words dead Y publishers, they are therefore the contributors who add the date of death of personalities on their Wikipedia page. The term was popularized by web developer Hay Kranen in 2018. on his blog.
He argues, for example, that of the 26 English Wikipedia pages of known personalities who died in 2018, there were 26 different contributors to add the date of death. But the “dead” play the mystery card as Hay Kranen points out that “two-thirds of these modifications were made by anonymous users”, who did not log into their account and generally did so from their phone, making it difficult to elaborate. a typical profile. profile.
Faced with the “dead” who want to publish first, always faster, sometimes act without scruples and do not always review the information before publishing it, Wikipedia establishes safeguards.
“In the Wikipedia software, the tools allow each new contribution to be identified to see if it is appropriate to appear there,” he specifies. In this way, well-known personalities are closely watched. For example, the death of Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize in Medicine, very controversial during the pandemic, was announced by france night. However, this medium is not considered reliable by Wikipedia. The collaborators waited for the AFP to officially announce it to publish his obituary.
“Often the AFP is no longer the first to announce the deaths, but Wikipedia or Twitter”, observes Pierre-Yves Baudoin. As a consequence of disinformation on social networks, the death of personalities is announced on his Wikipedia page, before being quickly removed, such as Gorbachev, the victim of a hoax in 2012. The death of Jacques Chirac had also been published three times on his page of Wikipedia before the ruling party. ad.
“Back”
Then begins a game of ping-pong and a search for information between the “dead” and the Wikipedia community, which is trying to suppress these unofficial death announcements. Everyone behind their screen, but the community will always have the final point of the edition.
the gThe editing war at Wikipedia, and the willingness of some contributors to want to edit an obituary quickly and first, speaks volumes about our relationship with information and the way Wikipedia is forced to keep up with this acceleration. For Pierre-Yves Baudoin, the challenge of the encyclopedia is to “maintain its DNA and keep taking a step back.”
So, does Wikipedia go out of its way when it talks about immediate information like the war in Ukraine or Covid? To this Pierre-Yves Baudoin responds “that it is absolutely necessary to avoid false information on Wikipedia with the virality of social networks”.
Source: BFM TV
