On 31 December 2015 at 08:12 geni <geniice@gmail.com> wrote:

Partial list of works that will hit the public domain at midnight tonight can be found at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_in_public_domain

That said this will have a fairly limited impact on wikipedia due to issues with US copyright laws.

Thanks. The impact on Commons and Wikisource is typically more noticeable. 

Some thoughts.

I was looking around on Wikidata: generating lists of creators of works with death dates in a given year, and associated with a given country, is a natural task for it. From a Wikisource point of view, authors who write in a given language is relevant, and there was a game created a couple of months ago to fill in the corresponding data - seems not to be online right now, though.

My first pass at authors dying in 1945 yielded 103, as opposed to the 72 or so in the enWP page you give. (Those are mostly writing in German, which is probably more to do with attention paid to the "occupation" field than anything else.)

This business was discussed earlier in the year: the old thread at

http://wikimediauk-l.wikimedia.narkive.com/4nyiV2zt/wikidata-training-session

contains contributions from Andrew Gray, in particular a query using subclasses of "author" which is certainly a good idea. But artists are also relevant.

A heavyweight SPARQL query that factored in the various copyright jurisdictions would be a project I'd like to see done, of course. [1] is a bare bones "humans who died in 1945" query, which should bring up about 10,000 hits.

Charles

[1] https://query.wikidata.org/#PREFIX%20wikibase%3A%20%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fwikiba.se%2Fontology%23%3E%0APREFIX%20wd%3A%20%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikidata.org%2Fentity%2F%3E%20%0APREFIX%20wdt%3A%20%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikidata.org%2Fprop%2Fdirect%2F%3E%0A%0ASELECT%20%3Fitem%20%3FitemLabel%20%3Flast_time%20WHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%7B%0A%09%09%09SELECT%20%3Fitem%20(MAX(%3Ftime0)%20AS%20%3Flast_time)%20%20WHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20%09%09%09%3Fitem%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ5%20.%0A%20%20%09%09%09%3Fitem%20wdt%3AP570%20%3Ftime0%20.%0A%20%20%09%09%09FILTER%20(%20%3Ftime0%20%3E%3D%20%221945-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z%22%5E%5Exsd%3AdateTime%20%26%26%20%3Ftime0%20%3C%3D%20%221945-12-31T00%3A00%3A00Z%22%5E%5Exsd%3AdateTime%20)%20.%0A%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D%20%20GROUP%20BY%20%3Fitem%0A%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%0A%20%20%20%20SERVICE%20wikibase%3Alabel%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20bd%3AserviceParam%20wikibase%3Alanguage%20%22en%22%20.%0A%20%20%20%20%7D%0A%0A%7D%20ORDER%20BY%20ASC%20(%3Flast_time)