I do find this an excellent proposal.

Wouldn’t it be good to also implement a user status/right “deceased” to identify those accounts?

This information could be shown to their user rights page e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserRights/Geertivp?

One could get a list of volunteers that are no longer amongst us via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ListUsers.

Geert Van Pamel