About dirtn.app

Somewhere around the fourth time a friend group argument broke out over whether a particular character actor was still alive — and the fifth time someone won that argument by pulling up a Wikipedia infobox on their phone — it became clear the internet needed a faster, dumber, more direct way to answer one question: is this person still here or not?

That's dirtn.app. Type a name. Get an answer. That's the whole product.

How it actually works

dirtn.app doesn't maintain its own database of who's alive and who isn't — that would be an enormous, constantly-stale undertaking, and frankly a little morbid to run solo. Instead, it queries Wikidata, the structured, machine-readable sibling project to Wikipedia, through its public API. When you search a name, we ask Wikidata's search index for humans matching it, then read each one's recorded properties: date of birth, date of death, occupation, and a portrait where one exists. No death date on file, and the person is — as far as the public record shows — still with us. A death date shows up, and, well, you get the other verdict.

If a name turns up nothing, we quietly ask Wikipedia's search engine whether you meant something else, and try again with its suggestion. That's why "betty whte" still finds Betty White.

One honest caveat about the verdict itself: Wikidata's death records thin out the further back you go, so "no death date" is not by itself proof of a pulse. If the birth year implies someone would be older than any documented human lifespan, we say so rather than claiming they're alive.

Where useful, we also pull summary text and images from Wikipedia itself, under its Creative Commons license, and link back to both the Wikidata item and the Wikipedia article so you can see the primary source yourself rather than just taking our word for it.

Crucially: we don't edit or "own" any of this data. Wikidata and Wikipedia are edited continuously, in real time, by tens of thousands of volunteer contributors around the world — the same people who update an actor's filmography the day a new movie is announced are often the ones who add a death date within hours of a public death announcement. dirtn.app just asks the question and relays the current answer.

Worth being precise about how current, since that's the whole point of the site. Each person's page is cached and served from a CDN, which is what makes it load instantly — but a cached page is by definition a snapshot. So when the page opens, your browser quietly asks Wikidata one more question: does this person have a date of death today? If the answer disagrees with the cached page, the verdict updates in front of you and says so. That check runs on every visit, so the alive-or-dead answer you see is current even when the page around it isn't.

Why it's sometimes wrong

Because it's built entirely on crowd-sourced, constantly-changing public data, dirtn.app inherits every flaw that comes with that territory:

• Lag. A death might happen before Wikidata is updated to reflect it. Volunteers are fast, but they're not instant.
• Vandalism and errors. Anyone can technically edit Wikidata; most bad edits get caught and reverted quickly, but not always immediately.
• Ambiguity. Two people can share a name. A death report can be unconfirmed, disputed, or a hoax that briefly makes it into someone's edit history.
• Missing data. Some public figures — especially those famous decades ago and less online since — simply don't have a complete, well-maintained Wikidata entry.

We say all this upfront because we'd rather you trust the site's honesty than its infallibility. If you ever spot a wrong answer, the fix isn't to yell at us — it's usually a two-minute edit at the source. Our Corrections page walks through exactly how to do that, plus how to reach us directly for urgent cases.

Who made this

dirtn.app is an independent side project built and maintained by Donny West. No editorial board, no newsroom, no team of morticians on staff — just one person who thinks Wikidata is one of the more underrated resources on the open web, and that "is this person still alive" deserves a faster answer than five clicks into a Wikipedia infobox.

If you've got a bug report, a correction, or just want to say the site made you laugh at a genuinely inappropriate moment, reach out at donnywest@gmail.com.

A word of respect

This site pokes fun at a genuinely uncomfortable question, but it tries hard not to punch down. We don't run jokes about specific deaths, we don't speculate about causes beyond what's publicly and reliably documented, and we take corrections — especially urgent ones — seriously and fast. Being dead is the one thing that happens to all of us; there's no need to be cruel about the order.