Wikipedia:WikiJackal

A WikiJackal, poised to pounce on the article of a newly deceased celebrity

WikiJackals (Canis wikimortis) are a form of WikiFauna with the reputation for reveling in being the very first editors to change a recently-deceased celebrity, queen or other prominent person's article to reflect their status as dead. Such editors keep content on death and Wikipedia up to date.

Behavior

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, 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.

Relations with other WikiFauna

WikiJackals are most like WikiRoadRunners, in that they edit in a very fast-paced way, except WikiJackals focus this fast-paced editing on being the first to update an article to inform people that the subject just died a few minutes before. In theory, a WikiJackal should be related to some sort of WikiVulture, but WikiJackals strike so fast after a celebrity has died that they leave nothing for a slower-moving WikiVulture to do, that they would render WikiVultures extinct. It's possible that WikiVultures may exist as some form of WikiCryptid, patrolling pages of obscure formerly well-known but since forgotten people that no one had previously noticed had died, and updating those pages, but it is unlikely that someone would devote themselves to such unglorified work, so most likely such oversights are simply caught by WikiGnomes 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