[samhwr]

Oh I see, you mean you were just making the descriptive statement that people will speculate if they are not given information? I took you to be saying that they (the family or whoever has the right to give out that information) were actually obliged to tell people.

In that case, sorry about the misunderstanding. I agree with you in that descriptive sense, that people will speculate.

I also think they ought not to speculate or demand information, and that it's quite l̶u̶r̶i̶d̶ [edit: morbid, rather] of them to do so. I understand the psychology behind it, because generally information is transparent and accessible by default these days. And generally that's a good thing. But people may not want to share certain information when grieving a loved one's death - and when they may still need to tell people who were close to him, rather than letting them find out from a trending Twitter topic. They may even never want the manner of their loved one's death to be an open fact on Wikipedia, like for instance David Carradine's family might have wished. I'm sympathetic in either case. I think we internet people as a whole really ought to be sympathetic too. Some of the comments on this thread are appalling in their sense of entitlement to know this information.