Interesting! I noticed that suddenly a lot more politicians were showing up in my queries - have you been adding the occupation=politician property? I believe politicians are severely underrepresented on Wikipedia projects (except for the top people in the news) so if you have good metadata, then yes, it would probably be useful to do a data upload. One caveat is that for non-English countries, you need the descriptions and labels for any new items in the native language, or else I think we will only end up with doubles in the long run. I am not sure if there is any specific projects per country-related Wikipedia (I mean like France-French Wikipedia, etc) working on politicians, but otherwise you can try to get them active.

On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 5:30 PM, Lucy Chambers <lucy@mysociety.org> wrote:

Hi folks,


Very happy to see this discussion happening.


I work on the EveryPolitician project [0] and for several years, we have been mapping official IDs to Wikidata IDs. We have probably half the national legislators in the world mapped this way, and many of the ones we’re missing are because we don’t believe the people have Wikidata items yet.


We’d be happy to make the mappings we have available to the Wikidata community but the relevant properties for official identifiers only exist for a handful of countries at the moment[1].


EveryPolitician is currently funded by WMF for a related project [2] to find ways to improve the quality of data about politicians in Wikidata. As part of this project, our plan was to work with in-country partners on a case-by-case basis to get these properties created, but in light of this discussion perhaps we should explore creating many more of them in bulk more quickly? Suggestions welcome.  


Lucy


[0] http://everypolitician.org/

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Parliaments#For_members_of_parliament

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/EveryPolitician



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