Categories are done by hand, at most one could write a bot that looked for infobox or introduction text containing date of birth/death and automatically add the category if it didn't exist, but as a rule it seems that if someone's died then a date of death is usually there and usually so are the categories you'd need.

 

If not, then these other options might help somewhat......

  

(1)  Biographies will often start like this:  NAME (born 18 May 1862, died 17 June 1941, Sweden) was a.....

 

So you could search for articles with the words died 1941 in them. Trouble is there are many reasons an article could have those words. Limiting it to biographical articles might help.  Some search engines allow you to search for pages where the specific words appear close together but Wikipedia's search doesn't have that feature, or not yet. Even so this search does turn up useful results, especially combined with the incategory: operator.  You can also narrow down by adding words that copyright creators are likely to have, such as "author" "playwright", "poet" "artist" etc. Try these searches:

 

born died 1941  (biographies with "died" will usually also have "born", use this to narrow down)

died 1941 author   (not so helpful)

born died 1941 wrote  (adding one "copyright-creator" word seems to work, just. Adding more seems to confuse things)

died 1941 incategory:"Polish writers"  (but doesn't pick up articles nested in subcategories)

 

(2)  Google has proximate word searching and can be told to list content from just one site. All Wikipedia articles are indexed on Google. But it's very limited in what it will show you and can't detect other things needed to narrow it down. Try this in Google search:

 

 

(3)  A third option which will pick up names of articles (but no further details) is this category search tool:

http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php which lets you enter a category and search several layers deep. So nested categories will show up. Try entering "Novelists" under "categories" and "3" under "depth".

There may be other ways, such as common terms that only appear in biographies.  Perhaps someone else will have ideas.

 

 

 

FT2