[FelipeCortez]

This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/:

  SELECT ?work ?workLabel ?author ?authorLabel ?publicationDate ?ageAtPublication
  WHERE {
    ?author wdt:P569 ?birth .
    ?author wdt:P570 ?death .
    ?author wdt:P800 ?work .
  
    ?work wdt:P50 ?author ;
          wdt:P31 wd:Q47461344 ;
          wdt:P577 ?publicationDate .
  
    FILTER(?publicationDate <= ?death)
  
    BIND(YEAR(?publicationDate) - YEAR(?birth) AS ?ageAtPublication)
    FILTER(?ageAtPublication > 60)
  
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  }
  ORDER BY DESC(?ageAtPublication)
  LIMIT 300

[andai]

How can I learn more about this? I looked into it recently but didn't get very far.

This seems like the kind of thing that should be more widely known, and have some good tutorials written for it :)

[FelipeCortez]

The Wikidata documentation is good:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction

And you can find lots of SPARQL examples here:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/...

[carefulfungi]

Wow - this is super cool. Thanks for sharing!

[CobrastanJorji]

This is a very cool query tool that I haven't seen before, thanks! (Also the syntax drives me a little batty).

I tried modifying it to give me authors whose first publication (any publication at all) happened after 60 years old, but also who had at least one wdt:P800 work. I got people like Cato the Elder, Josephus, and William of Tyre.

I tried again for only people born in the 20th century, and I got some results (plus quite a bit of wrong answers, presumably something about the query or data)! Oddly quite a few of the results are from criminals who wrote an autobiography after their release, including Henri Charrière and the infamous Nazi, Albert Speer.

[OfirMarom]

This is actually very awesome. Had no idea about this.

[tantalor]

Can you filter by "major works only"?

[FelipeCortez]

that's kind of what P800 (notable work) is doing, but you can try some approximations to "major work" with "has both an English Wikipedia page and a Goodreads link":

  ?work wdt:P50 ?author ;
        wdt:P577 ?publicationDate ; 
        wdt:P8383 ?goodreadsID .

  ?article schema:about ?work ;
           schema:isPartOf <https://en.wikipedia.org/> ;
           schema:inLanguage "en" .

[throw4847285]

I don't think that's what they meant by major.

[par1970]

Why?