How should obituaries be posted

[Webmaster]

Since i don't care I'll leave it up to the users

[pbrower2a]

(05-21-2016, 10:47 PM)Webmaster Wrote: Since i don't care I'll leave it up to the users

The old T4T thread "Obituaries" was a hodgepodge. Among others that I put there were

athletes
screen actors and movie or TV executives
political figures
scientists and mathematicians
engineers and inventors
clergy
academic figures
authors
criminals
exemplars of heroism

I even had a dog who had performed some heroic rescues after an earthquake and apparently died of exhaustion.

...and even a near-neighbor who was well past 100 and was born in Imperial Russia.

So, do Henry Hill and Stan Musial belong in the same list? Does a Righteous Gentile who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust belong with someone similar (Chemical Ali) to the Nazis that she thwarted? But that involves good and evil. I had a centenarian near-neighbor born in Imperial Russia... and one of the greatest cellists ever, also born in Russia. Does anyone really want to connect those two?

We are going to have people who fit multiple categories. Ronald Reagan would have fit both the "actor" category and "American politicians".

I scattered the categories into areas in which they might fit. When "parents" or "interesting neighbors or near-neighbors" arise, that could be in "What's Happening with You?"

I have yet to figure where I would put criminals.

[Eric the Green]

It was helpful to have one place to go to to see who has passed on, rather than a few different ones that would probably get lost in the crowd of threads and have to search through pages and pages of past threads for them.

A miscellaneous category that is not "light-hearted" would be good. Personally I am not interested in "lighthearted" stuff too much; it's mostly boring trivialities. Humor; maybe. But that can appear in any thread.

[pbrower2a]

(05-22-2016, 04:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It was helpful to have one place to go to to see who has passed on, rather than a few different ones that would probably get lost in the crowd of threads and have to search through pages and pages of past threads for them.

A miscellaneous category that is not "light-hearted" would be good. Personally I am not interested in "lighthearted" stuff too much; it's mostly boring trivialities. Humor; maybe. But that can appear in any thread.

There's nothing light-hearted  about death. Discussing "a teacher who set me on the right career path" would be in "What's happening with You?" In such we can leave tributes.

One poster castigated me for mocking the deaths of evil people (we are running out of Nazi war criminals, but there are still some nasty brutes from the Cambodian killing fields, the Rwanda genocide, Ba'athist gangsters, and of course the usual petty criminals and gangsters. I was allegedly dancing on graves. My sympathy is with innocent people and not with killers. I helped establish the Wikipedia policy of making the perpetrator subordinate to the criminal unless the criminal is notable for something other than crimes (like his case becoming an issue in itself) or doing so would be awkward, as with serial or mass killers. I do not want to leave a delinquent person the dubious achievement of getting a page in Wikipedia for committing a robbery-murder. Wrongly-convicted people are cleared because they are no longer guilty and their wrongful conviction and subsequent exoneration of horrific crimes constitute stories worthy of report.

Yes, I will take delight in the death of Charles Manson when such happens.

[pbrower2a]

(05-22-2016, 04:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It was helpful to have one place to go to to see who has passed on, rather than a few different ones that would probably get lost in the crowd of threads and have to search through pages and pages of past threads for them.

A miscellaneous category that is not "light-hearted" would be good. Personally I am not interested in "lighthearted" stuff too much; it's mostly boring trivialities. Humor; maybe. But that can appear in any thread.

In view of the slight activity other than mine in putting the obituaries up, such looks like a good idea. One tricky issue might be with persons who fit two or more categories. For example, had the person been Ronald Reagan, would we have had him as a movie star or as a politician? The categories that I have already created are terribly vague. We might as well put them together in one category. It might be off-putting to some to see a gangster sandwiched between a war hero and a Nobel laureate in physics... but that could happen here. That's how the old T4T Forums went.