WikiObits.com is a project designed to allow us all to memorialize the people we love through obituaries. Whether our loved ones are famous or our family or friends, everyone should have an obituary. Our goal is to create a huge database of obits for people that both encapsulates their lives, and provides the basic information necessary to properly recognize the accomplishments of the deceased. We are not just a list of dead celebrities, we are a wealth of biographical information.
WikiObits is a wiki just like the http://WikiPedia.org project that has become so famous. A wiki is just a collection of documents that are stored electronically in a logical way that is open for editing. We leave the content in our wiki totally open so anyone who knows about the given person can edit and enhance the content.
In the case of our obituary wiki, we hope that anyone who knows important or interesting things about a person can contribute to the person's obituary. As a minimum we are hoping that each WikiObit contains basic information about the person (name, hometown, place of birth, birthday, and a picture) and a couple of paragraphs written as an obituary.
Many of our obituaries at WikiObits are premature and the celebrity may not be dead. To avoid confusion, we assign the status "TBV" to all of our obituaries until we can verify the celebrity's death details. If you believe that the subject of an obit is still alive, please read the next FAQ item... Does the person have to be deceased?
Heck no - many of our obituaries are premature of the subject's death. We'd prefer to include everyone; dead or alive. That way when the person dies of the subject's death (you know it's inevitable) we will have a complete reference of obits online so visitors will be able to remember the life of the recently deceased without waiting for someone to write a new obituary.
Prewriting obits is a practice as old as publishing. You don't think the New York Times writes a new obituary from scratch as soon as a famous person dies? They have staff constantly writing obituaries for famous people who are alive so they always have an obit ready to go. That way when a celebrity dies, they can be the first to publish an obituary, hopefully beating the competition.
We don't have any fake obituaries at Wikiotits. At first glance some of our obituaries may seem fake, but you're missing the point of our project. Every one of our obituaries contains biographical information that we believe to be true - based on free information on the Internet. If the subject of an obit is not dead, the obituary has been pre-written using our standard template so when he/she/they dies, we will have an obit available highlighting the person's life.
Of course you can. You know best about what your life is about. Just remember, other people can edit your obit too, so you may want to be at least a little humble :). To get started just fill in this form.
When you create a new obituary in WikiObits it appears as a template containing some of the things that we think are important to include in each obit. We obviously don't want to tell you what to write since every person with a WikiObits is different, but we can make some suggestions. First, you could simply describe the person and their interests and what makes them important and unique. You could also tell specific stories that convey the person's true personality to the world. You could also write about what you feel makes the person special and worthy of having an obituary.
For more help have a look at our writing an obituary resource page.
We realize that, because everyone has access to every obituary in our wiki, there is a possibility that someone can vandalize or even delete whole parts of any obituary. While we firmly believe in our community's dedication to the project and upholding honor in writing WikiObits, we do understand that we don't live in a utopian society. This is why we have implemented the rollback feature on all sections of all obits. If you find that someone has made a mess of an obit, you can revert the obit to an earlier version before any vandalism or deletion occurred with just one click. In addition, we regularly log IP addresses and recall them when rollbacks occur, so that we can review cases and block people from the website when necessary.
For people that have bios in our obituary database that have common names, we employ, disambiguation pages. Each disambiguation page features all of the obituary records using the name and allows you to select the specific one based on the person's birth date and/or category.
There are a few ways that you can start exploring the world of WikiObits: First, you can create your own obituary so that people can write about you and your importance to the world. Once you have created an obit for yourself and filled in some of the basics, you can invite others to write about you too.
Another way to get started is to edit the obit of a friend or someone famous who already has an obituary at WikiObits.com. Try Searching to find the obituary for the person you'd like to edit.
You can add an obituary for someone you know who you think is deserving of being memorialized. That way you can be the first to write about them and tell their story to the world.
Finally, you can become involved in WikiObitsby being a moderator.
Please do! You have worked hard on crafting your WikiObits, and we want the world to be able to see it. If you have a web page or business with and an "About Us" section, feel free to link to your WikiObits. Same goes for Facebook and Blog accounts; whenever you want people to know more about you and your life, link to your WikiObits.