Wikipedia:WikiJackal

This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken seriously.

WikiJackals (Canis wikimortis) are a form of

You may wake up in the middle of the night, awakened by a push notification on your iPhone with breaking news that a celebrity has just died. You check the celebrity's Wikipedia article, and lo and behold, you find the article has already been updated, and you look at the time stamps of the edits, and they seem to be almost simultaneous with the time of death of the person as reported in major news outlets. There will usually be a {{recent death}} template posted as well. Information on the nature of the death may be scant, or it may be completely wrong and have to be edited later, or it may later turn out the celebrity did not actually die after all,^[1][2][3][4] but for the WikiJackal accuracy is subordinate to the all-important "status" of being the editor who gets to report the death first. It is unknown why they do this, but it may have something to do with them having a contribution to the encyclopedia, whether it be factual or not.

Many WikiJackals will update articles to include death date from an IP address rather than a registered user account, and the edit history will indicate this was a mobile edit. This indicates that these are probably experienced editors who edit the article from the device where they first learned of the death and do not bother to login before making the change because they don't want to waste any time getting to a real computer or logging in lest someone else beat them to the punch.

WikiJackals are most like

in the course of their other activities.

Identification

If you are a WikiJackal and wish to identify yourself, feel free to use this userbox:

Code	Result
{{Template:User wikipedia/WikiJackal}}	This user is a WikiJackal.	Usage

References