User blog comment:TheFanatic/Using Past Tense on this Wiki/@comment-22460-20120305172615

Past tense was decided some time ago by a consensus of active uses at the time. It is partly based on wikis such as Memory Alpha, Memory Beta, TARDIS (the Doctor Who wiki), and Wookieepedia. To simplify the way in which people (etc) are dealt with, dealing with everything in "past tense" makes it easier on everyone. Otherwise, precisely which era are you dealing with? When is an article written?

In the Buffy/Angel universe (like those others mentioned above), people get offed on a fairly regular basis, often "off-camera", and it's often referred to in a one-liner somewhere. These things get missed, and those people would all have to be updated to past tense along the way. Choosing an arbitrary time period to write in that is post-everything just makes it simpler.

This also avoids many awkward grammatical constructs that people seem prone to these days (such as past imperfect "X would then meet Y" rather than "X met Y") and tendencies to pretend that because we don't know a death date, it doesn't matter that the person would be 400 years old, we should write about them like they're still alive!