On 05/10/2007, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@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 :-)