This is deathbot, the newest addition to our family of Freebase bots.

Al created deathbot to help us keep track of recent deaths. He (deathbot that is, not Al) walks Wikipedia’s Recent Deaths page, finds the equivalent entry in Freebase, and makes sure that person is typed as a deceased person. The date and cause of death are also set.

The bot family includes bots that load data, perform merges based on recommendations from our review queue, and set geolocations. You may see them from time to time in the topic histories.

If you create your own bot for use with our API (which is totally permitted, by the way) please let us know, as we may want to add it to our bot group.