Wikipedia API: search for famous people

Question

I have the following Wikipedia API search query:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?&action=query&generator=search&gsrnamespace=0&gsrlimit=20&prop=pag

Answer 1

I think all persons will have ... birthDate) (if still alive) or birthDate - died) in the first line of the extract. So I guess you can filter only records with an extract matching this regex:

^[^.]*\d{4}\)[^.]*\..*

Which will only match texts with something like 2001) in the first row.

If it's safe to assume that other records don't have it (I'm not sure that it is), then you can stop there. If not, at least you filtered a few more records before checking the revision.