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