Election data - Wikidata - lists.wikimedia.org

Marco Neumann

11 Mar 11 Mar

8:57 a.m.

we had a go at this during the wikidatacon 2017 in Berlin. my take away from this session is that there is indeed an emerging pattern for representing data related to political events, organizations, individual and themes on wikidata but that at the of the day you will have to make your decision to accommodate localized idiosyncrasies in the data. you can take look at the documentation here: Well structured political data for the whole world - impossible Utopia or Wikidata at its best by Lucy Chambers https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2017/Documentation and the Politics Track: Wikidata and Open Government (Meta)Data - A missing link? Well structured political data for the whole world: impossible utopia, or Wikidata at its best? Politics Meetup Marco On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 9:06 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

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Hi, Different countries have different processes for elections: registration of political parties and candidates, the form of the ballot, the system for counting the votes and dividing the seats in the legislature, etc. I was surprised not to find almost any data about electoral history for Israeli political parties. I also couldn't find it for other famous political parties around the world, like CDU (Germany), Syriza (Greece), or GOP (U.S.). Representing it in Wikidata is somewhat challenging because of the differences between the countries, because parties, candidates lists, and fractions are different things, etc. But only somewhat: it definitely doesn't sound impossible. Is there any country whose electoral processes and history are represented comprehensively in Wikidata? If not, were there any attempts to even discuss it? Thanks! -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

-- --- Marco Neumann KONA

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Yuri Astrakhan

12 Mar 12 Mar

11:23 p.m.

Something I wish was available is the voting record, at least at a country/state level. Knowing the politician's time in office is a great start, but how that person voted is what really makes democracy work. On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 5:16 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Hoi, For the majority of US states and territories (eg Kentucky <https://query.wikidata.org/embed.html#%23defaultView%3ATimeline%0A%23TEMPLATE%3D%7B%20%22template%22%3A%20%22Governors%20of%20%3Fstate%22%2C%20%22variables%22%3A%20%7B%20%22%3Fstate%22%3A%20%7B%20%22query%22%3A%20%22SELECT%20%3Fid%20WHERE%20%7B%20%3Fid%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ35657.%20%7D%22%20%7D%20%7D%20%7D%0ASELECT%20%3Fgovernor%20%3FgovernorLabel%20%3Fstart%20%3Fend%20%3Fimage%20WHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20BIND(wd%3AQ1603%20AS%20%3Fstate)%0A%20%20%3Fstate%20wdt%3AP1313%20%3Fposition.%0A%20%20%3Fgovernor%20wdt%3AP31%20wd%3AQ5.%0A%20%20%3Fgovernor%20p%3AP39%20%3Fstatement.%0A%20%20%3Fstatement%20ps%3AP39%20%3Fposition.%0A%20%20OPTIONAL%20%7B%20%3Fstatement%20pq%3AP580%20%3Fstart.%20%7D%0A%20%20OPTIONAL%20%7B%20%3Fstatement%20pq%3AP582%20%3Fend.%20%7D%0A%20%20BIND(IF((BOUND(%3Fstart))%20%26%26%20(!BOUND(%3Fend))%2C%20NOW()%2C%20%3Funbound)%20AS%20%3Fend)%0A%20%20OPTIONAL%20%7B%20%3Fgovernor%20wdt%3AP18%20%3Fimage.%20%7D%0A%20%20SERVICE%20wikibase%3Alabel%20%7B%20bd%3AserviceParam%20wikibase%3Alanguage%20%22%5BAUTO_LANGUAGE%5D%2Cen%22.%20%7D%0A%7D> ) I have added the dates of governors holding office to Wikidata. This information is based on lists from the English Wikipedia. So you can follow the transition from the different parties (do not forget parties like the Wiggs).. When this information is complete I hope to bring this into a query that shows the US states and territories with maps; a colour change for the political party and a link that shows the politicians in power at that time. Sure there are other functions like senators, representatives lieutenant governors.. they can be included. It is however a relevant start. Thanks, GerardM On 11 March 2018 at 09:06, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

Hi, Different countries have different processes for elections: registration of political parties and candidates, the form of the ballot, the system for counting the votes and dividing the seats in the legislature, etc. I was surprised not to find almost any data about electoral history for Israeli political parties. I also couldn't find it for other famous political parties around the world, like CDU (Germany), Syriza (Greece), or GOP (U.S.). Representing it in Wikidata is somewhat challenging because of the differences between the countries, because parties, candidates lists, and fractions are different things, etc. But only somewhat: it definitely doesn't sound impossible. Is there any country whose electoral processes and history are represented comprehensively in Wikidata? If not, were there any attempts to even discuss it? Thanks! -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

_______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

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Yuri Astrakhan

12:21 a.m.

Seems like they simply store it as wiki markup - https://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Marco+Rubio&action=editedit, unless they generate it from some other internal database. On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 8:10 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

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Hi!

Something I wish was available is the voting record, at least at a country/state level. Knowing the politician's time in office is a great start, but how that person voted is what really makes democracy work.

I think Ballotpedia has this data. E.g.: https://ballotpedia.org/Marco_ Rubio Not sure however if it's structured or available in API form. It also has state level politicians, e.g.: https://ballotpedia.org/Bill_Monning - but it seems it's even harder to parse there. -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org

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Tony Bowden

14 Mar 14 Mar

3:09 p.m.

On 12 March 2018 at 23:23, Yuri Astrakhan <yuriastrakhan(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Something I wish was available is the voting record, at least at a country/state level. Knowing the politician's time in office is a great start, but how that person voted is what really makes democracy work.

This is something I've been working on for quite a while: at mySociety we do this for the UK (e.g. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10133/jeremy_corbyn/islington_north), and we've worked with a lot of groups who want to do something similar in other countries. But there are a lot of prerequisites to being able to do this, one of which is simply being able to even get a (well maintained) list of all the legislators and their parties etc. We got some funding to accelerate Wikidata having even that level of data across more countries (you can follow some of that / join in at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_every_politician), but we definitely see that as being only the first step towards being able to do these much more useful things later. It's not clear to me, though, that Wikidata is the correct place to store this deeper information about voting records. Having items for all the individual politicians is definitely a good thing — they're all sufficiently notable. But having items for every bill going through every legislature seems like more of a stretch. I'd be very happy to be wrong about that though! Tony

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