Wikidata In Memoriam Screensaver
The Wikidata In Memoriam screensaver shows people recorded as having died in the last few weeks, queried live from Wikidata with SPARQL, key-less. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the Wikidata In Memoriam screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
People recorded as having died in the last few weeks, queried live from Wikidata with SPARQL, key-less. The query is bounded at both ends deliberately: Wikidata holds a long tail of placeholder death dates in 2100 and beyond that would otherwise fill the board.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours and any options can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
How Wikidata records a death
Wikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual knowledge base that stores structured data for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Data is entered and maintained by Wikidata editors, and bots also add data. Instead of articles it stores statements about items: a person is an item, and a date of death is a statement attached to it with a property called P570, described as the date on which the subject died.
The board lists people for whom a recent death date has been entered. That reflects when an editor or bot recorded it, not necessarily when the news broke, so a date may appear after a delay, and a recorded date can later be corrected. Not every death is recorded in Wikidata. The property carries sanity checks, such as a value range relative to the date of birth, and it should have a single best value.
The data can be queried with SPARQL, the query language of the Wikidata Query Service, which treats data as subject-predicate-object triples. What you see is a record of entries in a database, not a comprehensive or official register of deaths, and coverage depends on what has been entered.
A worked example
People recorded as having died in the last few weeks, queried live from Wikidata with SPARQL, key-less. The query is bounded at both ends deliberately: Wikidata holds a long tail of placeholder death dates in 2100 and beyond that would otherwise fill the board.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every number on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
- Is this an official record?
- No. It reflects what editors and bots have entered into Wikidata, which can be incomplete or later corrected.
- Why might a person appear days after they died?
- The entry shows when the date of death was recorded in the data, and that can lag the event.
- What is SPARQL?
- A query language for data stored as subject-predicate-object triples. Wikidata's Query Service uses it to search the knowledge base.