Update — I’m working with mySociety on the EveryPolitician project (hooray!)
Exciting news: I have recently started working with mySociety on the EveryPolitician project. I figured I should tell you about it as I’m going to be posting quite a lot about that here.
Specifically, my job is to work out how how a deeper integration with Wikidata (see the background here and the proposal here) will work from a people perspective. In practice that means helping both the team internally to decide what to work on and making life as easy as we can for the human editors of political data on Wikidata.
So far, I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve learnt about the different ways which governments in different countries have found to structure themselves. I’ve also been surprised at places where there is very little data, for example this list of countries with the political office of the head of government and who currently fills that role.
Over the coming weeks, you’ll be able to to follow and take part in the quest to get this information into Wikidata and learn some interesting titbits about how different countries arrange their political systems (useful for those of you who frequent quiz nights).
We will need a lot of help to get this sorted and I can vouch for the fact that adding this information is easy as soon as you know what you are looking for!
Stay tuned for the first exploratory series “What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?” coming soon!
Got an interesting use for political data? Let us know at @everypolitbot on Twitter.
