It was just a few minutes after 6:30 pm on Thursday, September 8, when the death of Queen Elizabeth II was announced. While in the press there was a race against time to get the information out as quickly as possible, multiplying the number of people hungry for information about the news that came out of Balmoral, there was another challenge on the Internet, more specifically on Wikipedia. .
Anyone who surfs the Internet has already immersed himself in Wikipedia, the open access encyclopedia developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to having a huge amount of information and being one of the main sources of research for any topic, Wikipedia also has another “responsibility”, since it is usually where digital assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant, will “drink” the information.
Being a 20-year-old encyclopedia, Wikipedia users have some expectations about the ability to quickly edit pages whenever a public figure dies. And given the longevity of the reign and the historical figure of the monarch, the task of altering the page of Elizabeth II it didn’t seem easy.
In addition, the huge number of visits to the page of the Queen of England also added more some homework pressure. According to data from the analysis of visits to the Wikipedia pages themselves, only on the day of the Queen’s death, the profile received almost 8.4 million visits. In the following days, the number of visits began to decrease, although it still remained in the millions of visits. On September 9, for example, the number dropped to five million and to two million on September 10.
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Source: Observadora
