When Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, Wikipedia's English-language article on her began changing within minutes of the BBC's announcement — contributors racing to switch verbs to past tense, update the infobox, and add a date of death, in an edit history that is still public today. Anyone can go back and watch a first draft of history assemble itself in real time, mistakes and all, faster than any single editor could have caught them.
The mechanism behind that speed is not unique to Wikipedia. Attention arrives in a narrow window after an event, and whoever occupies that window captures the traffic and the first framing that later coverage tends to inherit. Push notifications, auto-generated summaries, and live blogs are built almost entirely around winning that window, often before a human has finished reading the source material they are summarizing.
What this optimizes for is priority, not accuracy — being first, not being right — and treating a later correction as an acceptable cost of doing business. X's Community Notes system, built specifically to attach corrections to viral posts, illustrates the asymmetry rather than solving it: a false claim can accumulate millions of views before a note earns enough cross-partisan agreement to attach, by which point the uncorrected version has already done its work.
Wire services used to build in friction against this on purpose. The Associated Press's longstanding practice of requiring independent confirmation from multiple sources before moving a story existed precisely to slow down the moment when speed and accuracy pulled in different directions. Much of the infrastructure built since has been designed to remove that friction rather than preserve it.
The people most affected are not the publications chasing the window, who at least get the click. It is the reader, who absorbs a first framing that shapes their understanding before the fuller picture — usually messier, less dramatic, and available only with time — arrives to correct it, if it arrives at all.
Wikipedia's editors eventually locked the Queen's article to new edits within the hour, a blunt but honest tool: the ability to simply stop and verify before continuing. Real-time publishing has no equivalent of a lock button. It has a delete button, applied quietly, well after the traffic has already moved on to whatever is next.