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. :)