On 12/23/2011 7:02 PM, FT2 wrote:

(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".

The new CatScan is (IMHO) very unfriendly, you may find the old one more usable. Main page for all versions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CatScan

Either is a nice tool to get a list of content creators who died in a given year.

I wonder if there would be a way to set up a ping that would let you know whenever a biography has the year of death added or is written. For new articles, you could consider some form of new article report. This is currently done by TedderBot, see how it works in practice for our http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:POLAND#New_articles_announcements

I am not very familiar with the semantic side of things, it would be nice, and perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Persondata could be of use.

-- 
Piotr Konieczny
PhD Candidate
Dept of Sociology
Uni of Pittsburgh

http://pittsburgh.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus