Wikidata:WikiProject every politician

The overall aim of this WikiProject is to have complete and consistently structured data across the world on all elected representatives, from National to Local level.

The initial target is to have complete and comprehensive coverage of the current members of at least every national legislature, along with senior ministers, in a consistent format.

Secondary goals are to include historic data, sub-national, regional and local political data.

The data model for politicians is a Work In Progress attempt to document current best practices for modelling data about politicians and the positions they hold — please contribute/discuss!

For each country the primary aim is to make sure that all current members of the Legislative Branch, as well as the Head of Government and Cabinet have good biographical and position held (P39) information.

A full list of properties are outlined on the Political data model page.

In most cases that means consistently added position held (P39) records, with suitable qualifiers for parliamentary term (P2937), start time (P580), end time (P582), parliamentary group (P4100), electoral district (P768), elected in (P2715), etc., as well as basic biographical information (sex or gender (P21), date of birth (P569), place of birth (P19), given name (P735), etc) and links to authoritative third-party sources.

These are not all used consistently everywhere, and in some cases (particularly around Cabinet memberships) aren't really used widely enough yet for it to be clear that they are the best approaches for ease of both querying and data entry. Discussion on different/better approaches are very welcome!

As a (very) rough guide to how good the data is in a country, we are tracking what information already exists for the primary house of the national legislature:

• ☆: Basic structures in place, but cannot yet produce a list of current legislators
• ★: All current legislators are known to have items, but not all have suitable position held (P39) data yet
• ★★: Can produce a complete and accurate list of all current legislators

  i.e. each member has a position held (P39) with a suitable parliamentary term (P2937) (or for non term-based systems, has a correct start time (P580) with no end time (P582))

• ★★★: Can produce gender/age statistics of all current legislators by political party/group or region

  i.e. position held (P39) records have electoral district (P768) and parliamentary group (P4100) qualifiers to well-formed items (including a located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) on the electoral district items, or reciprocal associated electoral district (P7938) to each), and >95% members have sex or gender (P21) and date of birth (P569), where such information is published.

• ★★★★: Can compare such statistics for members of the cabinet vs members of the legislature

Browse the mini-projects that have already been created, or set one up for the country you're interested in. (To get started, you can cut and paste from another country and tweak the IDs — we'd recommend New Zealand if you want to start simple, or Germany if you want to dive right in with sub-national data too).

A Wikimedia Foundation grant enabled mySociety (Q10851773) to build some tools to help improve the input and management of political data, and may well be of interest more generally. Some of these include:

• PositionHolderHistory
  • See the full history of position holders, along with some simple detection of errors or omissions.
• Compare Wikidata with CSV
  • Allows you to compare information in Wikidata against an external source of data, to highlight errors and omissions.
• PositionStatements
  • This bot adds position held (P39) statements to items, using the same input format as QuickStatements. In contrast to the current version of QuickStatements, this bot can add a second version of a statement which already exists – necessary as an individual may hold a position multiple times and require multiple statements.
• {{Generic queries for positions}} : a wikidata template which includes generic SPARQL queries for positions. It is embedded in {{Item documentation}}.

The participants listed below can be notified using the following template in discussions:
{{Ping project|every politician}}

•   Wikidata:WikiProject British Politicians
•   Wikidata:WikiProject France/Politicians
•   Wikidata:WikiProject Heads of state and government/Germany (though about much more than Heads of State+Government)
•   Wikidata:WikiProject Finnish Elections
•   User:Sjoerddebruin/Dutch politics
•   Wikidata:WikiProject U.S. Congress
•   Wikidata:WikiProject Taiwan/Politics

• Wikidata:WikiProject Heads of state and government
• Wikidata:WikiProject elections
• Wikidata:WikiProject Parliaments
• Wikidata:WikiProject Country subdivision
• Wikidata:WikiProject every politician/Electoral district

The following property proposals relating to politicians are currently being discussed:

• Proposal submitted for comment - Wikidata:Property_proposal/OpenStates_ID
• Wikidata:Property_proposal/cabinet

The following have recently been created (or rejected)

• Arizona Legislators Then and Now ID — created as Arizona State Legislators: Then & Now ID (P10545)
• Virginia House of Delegates ID — created as Virginia House of Delegates ID (P9443)
• Michigan Legislative Bio ID — created as Michigan Legislative Bio ID (P10441)
• Ministry of the Interior of Italy ID — created as Ministry of the Interior of Italy ID (P8648)
• Our Campaigns candidate ID — created as Our Campaigns candidate ID (P8445)
• located in the constituency — created as associated electoral district (P7938)
• Political Graveyard politician ID — created as Political Graveyard politician ID (P8462)
• MyNeta.info political party ID (India) — created as MyNeta.info political party ID (P6716)
• Directorio Legislativo ID (Argentina) — created as Directorio Legislativo ID (P6585)
• Canadian Library of Parliament person ID — created as Library of Parliament of Canada person ID (P6616)
• National Assembly of Quebec ID — created as NAQ elected person ID (P3055)
• Democracy Club ID — created as Democracy Club candidate ID (P6465)
• Czech Parliament ID — created as Czech parliament ID (P6828)
• Brazilian federal deputy ID — created as Brazilian federal deputy ID (P7480)
• Hungarian member of parliament identifier — created as Hungarian National Assembly ID (P4966)
• designated survivor — rejected
• Parliament of South Africa ID — rejected
• US Senate Featured Biographies ID — rejected
• Wikidata:Property_proposal/Virginia Burgesses and Delegates Database ID — withdrawn as Virginia House of Delegates ID (P9443) existed

Recent Wikidata edit-a-thons and events with a focus on political data

• Editathon at Wikipedia:Madina Institute of Science and Technology (Dates: 2019 February 23, April 27 and May 25)

Theme: Seventh Parliament of the Fourth Republic of Ghana

Tasks: Adding or improving Wikidata and Wikipedia items on all 275 members of the Seventh Parliament of the Fourth Republic of Ghana.

• f0rk: February 2019. Scope: Improve data on French politicians.
• Wikimedia España: November 2018. Scope: Improve data on Spanish political data. More information
• SMEX: 15 September & 22 September 2018. Scope: Creating Wikipedia articles about members of parliament in Lebanon and linking to Wikidata / improving political data. For more information see Facebook event page. Blog post here: Supporting community events spotlight on social on social media exchange SMEX in Lebanon

Upcoming Wikidata edit-a-thons and events

(none known. If you know of anything please add it!)

Some interesting blog posts or presentations on political wikidata (please add more!):

• Well structured political data for the whole world: impossible utopia, or Wikidata at its best?
• Probing Parliament(s) with Wikidata
• Creating parliament charts with wikidata
• Wikidata, British Politicians and the History of Parliament Trust