Interesting Wikipedia Fact

I’ve just been searching on Wikipedia, hoping to find a list of writers who died accidental deaths.

Okay, that sounds ghoulish, but . . . well, no. It’s ghoulish. But it was prompted by the fact that I found out—through a long series of links on other subjects, the rationale for which I’ve forgotten now—that Tennessee Williams choked to death on the lid of an eye-drop bottle.

(I also found out that Robert E. Howard shot himself, which I’d never heard. And that the poet Hart Crane threw himself off a cruise boat into the Gulf of Mexico after being beaten up by a male crew member to whom he’d made advances. Poor bastard.)

I had no idea that that was how Williams died.

Hence the ghoulish searching.

But Wikipedia, while normally good on esoteric lists, had no such list.

Interestingly, though, when you search for “list of accidental deaths of writers,” the fourth item that comes up is “List of The Dick Van Dyke Show Episodes.”

Now, some might say this is simply because the search engine is pulling up key terms such as “list of” and “writers.”

I prefer to think it’s because Wikipedia knows dead when it sees it.