Andrew Gray wrote:
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*,
No, no asterisk, no "slightly" non-neutral. Just plain neutral, it's one of our foundation policies and not really negotiable. Obituaries turn into hagiographies far too often.
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.
This I can get behind, though of course "unreasonably long" is a subjective judgment.
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 :-)
On the other hand, it's nice to have all those news agencies out there doing research for us and presenting capsule summaries in nice easily-mimicked forms. :)