Wikipedia talk:Deceased Wikipedians/Guidelines

Add deceased date
The tophat Template:Deceased Wikipedian is a great idea to indicate and honor a Wikipedian's passing. It also has the option to include some custom text.

I propose that in these guidelines we include the request that whenever known, the tophat note include the year that the wikipedian was deceased. This would be much more orienting to any wikipedian passing by the userpage, and it would be one more relevant detail to share in honoring deceased wikipedians. Al83tito (talk) 23:46, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Declaring Wikipedians dead after a sufficiently long time?
Obviously, in the year 2500 all of us posting here today will be long dead. This means that we can and perhaps should declare all users dead after a sufficiently long time has passed since the account has been created. Old accounts should be blocked to prevent them from being hijacked. Obviously if my account were to be still active in the year 2200, then that alone would trigger some alerts here, so however one thinks about declaring people dead automatically, there should be a procedure to deal with accounts that are just too old to be linked to the original user. This issue is not something to worry about today, but it will become relevant in a few decades from now. Count Iblis (talk) 22:34, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
 * It would make a lot more sense to just routinely block (or at least de-autoconfirm) any account that hadn't logged in (either to this Wiki or, for people with unified accounts, to any part of the project) at all in, say, 5 or 10 years, with re-activation by simply asking for it on the user's talk page. I would go a step further and require some kind of proof and/or a sworn, notarized affidavit (or the editor's country-of-residence's legal equivalent) sent in to WP:OTRS that you are the original account-holder if you haven't logged in for, say, twice that length of time.  Hopefully by the time Wikipedia is 20 years old we will have a good way of doing global blocks while still allowing users to edit their own talk pages. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  02:24, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
 * It's a good thing Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, because if it was we'd have people proposing ponderous and awkward solutions to imagined problems. EEng 00:22, 13 August 2021 (UTC)
 * 20 years now and global blocks can't be done to accounts. Thingofme (talk) 09:10, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I've collapsed this section. Eidtors working now may well be alive in 100 years, so its too soon to consider Count Iblis's suggestion. And while Davidwr's suggestion may have merit, this is the wrong venue. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:30, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

I appreciate the long term thinking, and I support initiatives to automatically block/protect old users/user pages that have been inactive for a long time. Thank you. Al83tito (talk) 23:37, 12 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Maybe a person is wrongly dead/legally dead or sometimes somebody send a death certificate for a living person, so blocking is sometimes not possible may you have to verify into WP:OTRS. It has a lot of implications in real life as well... Thingofme (talk) 11:14, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

What if a person is wrongly dead
What happens if you are claimed dead by some reasons but you are still alive? May I have to send a ticket to WP:VRT to verify I am alive... In real life it has a lot of consequences. Thingofme (talk) 09:12, 6 July 2022 (UTC)


 * @Thingofme, we have had the occasional false claim of an editor being dead, and Missing Wikipedians is long enough that it probably includes the names of editors who have died. But for the most part, if you are off wiki for a while, and when you return, you unexpectedly find your account globally locked and Deceased Wikipedian on your user page, then you would probably want to follow the un-glocking process outlined at Global locks.  (Currently, that means sending e-mail to the Stewards.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:40, 12 April 2023 (UTC)