As many will know, last year on this list the idea came up of getting media coverage for authors whose works will fall out of copyright in 2011.

WMUK is looking at the press release side of this in recent discussions. But there is a bigger issue (as always with Wikimedia!), namely how to research the authors using WP. I mentioned it to Magnus Manske, and he has whipped up a prototype tool:

http://toolserver.org/~magnus/PDator.php

The idea is roughly category intersection and then union: the UK has a 70 year rule (as do many other countries - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_length for detail). By intersecting [[Category:British writers]] with [[Category:1940 deaths]] one can get started (http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/intersection/, use second box down, depth=6 works for me). But what I posed Magnus as a challenge was the global problem: Germany also has a 70 year rule, so the right or at least better thing to do is to intersect the author category for German writers with the 1940 deaths category, on deWP (will be fuller than enWP almost surely). Then compile a long list.

I'm not quite sure what Magnus has put into the prototype but it is proof-of-concept: brings up 138 names for me for 2011, and can be run for other years. Thorough use of interwiki is certainly kind of interesting here. Anyway it's complex: Cuba has a 50 year rule, esWP would be the place to start in on the categories, but you couldn't deny that looking in enWP might also give something fresh.

This discussion is adjourned from a WMUK internal list, where the press part is in hand. I thought this issue would be of more general interest. (Magnus is currently a bit busy, he says. Don't expect any instant upgrades, therefore.)

I started myself to tabulate writers round the world using plain intersection. There is stuff on a WMUK internal wiki that could easily be copied onto the UK wiki if others want to chip in.

FYI our "bold" list of authors who might be newsworthy, who died in 1940, currently reads as

*J. J. Thomson, physicist *E. F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia books *John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (novelist, 39 Steps) *W. H. Davies, poet and autobiographer *Victor Benjamin Neuburg, sidekick of Aleister Crowley *Eileen Power, important medieval historian *Marcus Garvey, prophet for Rastafarians *Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV, ruler of Mysore, friend of Gandhi *Herbert Guthrie-Smith, New Zealand conservationist *Leon Trotsky *Mikhail Bulgakov, novelist (cognoscenti say "The White Guard"), a new opera production in London with Simon Burney so topical *Isaak Babel.

Do add others here if you have them.

So there are really two things going on here:

*long-list: address the problem of getting a comprehensive global list of _notable_ authors (i.e. writers notable as writers) who died in a year making their works fall out of copyright in 2011, in the terms of the relevant period (usually 70 or 50 years, other do occur) . So 1940 or 1960 deaths, typically. *short-list: suggestions as to people the media might like to cover.

And that actually all excludes the American public domain position, which (as we found in 2009) makes for a much more complicated story. Hosting by the WMF on Wikisource (say) must go by US law. But there is Wikilivres, which is across the border in Canada. Any contacts there?

Charles