This subject is one of the reasons that Semantic MediaWiki was designed.
For example, in the article for [[Marilyn Monroe]] there is an infobox and it contains a template parameter with this code:
deathdate = {{death-date and age|August 5, 1962|June 1, 1926}}
In order to give the article [[Marilyn Monroe]] the semantic property deathdate you would write the exact same thing as above in the article. The difference is that in template {{death-date and age}} you would also write [[Died on::{{{1}}}]] which means [[Died on::August 5, 1962]].
The alternate method is to insert this semantic property inline with the article text. For example, "Marilyn Monroe died on [[Died on::August 5, 1962]]." This renders as "Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962".
The great benefit to this is that you can now ask semantic queries to output this information. For example, to print out the date that Marilyn Monroe died, you would write an ask parser function: {{#ask: [[Marilyn Monroe]] | ?Died on}}. This prints "August 5, 1962".
In order to print a list of all actors who recently died in table format, you might write: {{#ask: [[Category:Actors]] | ?Died on | sort=ascending }}.
Of course you can also manually maintain a list of recent deaths, which I think is done.
You can ask these sorts of questions using DBpedia as well: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:27 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
It's not automatic but if the person's talk page has the WP Biography banner on it, it has a switch called "living" which will put them in one of the following three categories (not word for word naming):
- Living People
- Dead People
- People missing Living statement
That combined with the death categories that different infoboxes put them into should give you a pretty good coverage.
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