[WikiEN-l] oopsie-- mainstream journalists trust Wikipedia again

[Andrew Gray]

On 05/10/2007, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> I once talked to a librarian at a major news organization here in the U.S.;
> one of the most interesting things I learned was that a big part of her job
> was doing biographical research on older famous people considered "likely to
> die soon" -- so that when they actually did bite the dust, there would have
> a nice obit ready to go. Apparently most news organizations do this.
> Wikipedia, on the other hand, just scrambles to catch up :)

The general rule is that if them dying would be mentioned on the
evening news, you want to have an obit ready to go. Anyone else, you
can take a week or three over. :-)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - a good Wikipedia
biography of a living person should, basically, be a draft obituary.
Neutral tending to slightly sympathetic*, comprehensive, organised,
and not unreasonably long; when they do actually die, we should just
have to change the tense here and there, change the date in the
introduction, and add a short paragraph at the end, same as you would
for publishing an obit.

If we have to scramble to get new stuff added when they die - assuming
they didn't die gunned down by police on Broadway, at least - then we
have, probably, not been doing our job too well earlier. Having to put
up that {{recentdeath}} notice is in many ways a sign we dropped the
ball :-)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

* or, at least, polite where possible...