Ted Kaczynski hasn't been anything other than a domestic terrorist since 1969 when he dropped out of academia at the ripe old age of 27. Sirhan Sirhan didn't have a profession, as far as I can tell he was working at a health food store when he assasinated RFK, and has spent the past 53 years incarcerated for it.

Charles Guiteau had a long career prior to assassinating Garfield, as did Booth before assassinating Lincoln. While both committed assassinations, there was no point in time where you could have hired either to assassinate someone for you, it wasn't either of their professions.

My whole point here is that their professions are not noteworthy, relevant, or interesting, but Wikipedian bureaucracy causes them to be mentioned, and I think it's dumb.

> I find "an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln" to be a ridiculous introduction; it should read "an American assassin who killed President Abraham Lincoln"

One sentence fragment conveys that Lincoln was assassinated, the assassin's nationality, and the assassin's profession in 67 characters. The other conveys that Lincoln was assassinated and the assassin's nationality in 58 characters.

You like the wrong sentence. It's stylistically kooky, too: you need to point out that an assassin killed someone? That doesn't feel a little redundant to you?

> the man's profession is completely irrelevant

Hardly. But mostly it's strange that you'd want wikipedia to make that determination for you. It's not necessary.

> "Standard wikipedia formatting" being burying the lead is not a compelling defense.

Burying the lede would involve putting the information you're burying somewhere other than the middle of the first sentence of the first paragraph.

Maybe you missed the part where I wrote about their notability rules. Boothe was notable because of an assassination. At no point was his stage career even worth mentioning.

Booth assassinated Lincoln in the theater while Lincoln was attending Booth's play and the fact everyone there knew he was an actor contributed directly to his escape from the scene. Just because you are uninterested in context does not make it irrelevant.