Grants:Project/mySociety/EveryPolitician
This project is funded by a Project Grant
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mysociety.orgProject idea
[edit]mySociety are the UK based charity behind TheyWorkForYou.com, WriteToThem.com, WhatDoTheyKnow.com and FixMyStreet.com. We have been working with political data and running parliamentary services for almost 15 years and our services are used by over 10 million people each year in at least 44 countries. The team has extensive international experience gained from on-the ground collaborations with local partners and volunteers in many countries across the world.
Currently our EveryPolitician project aims to gather free, well-structured, consistent data on every national politician in the world. EveryPolitician combines data from multiple primary and secondary sources, including Wikidata. Over the period that we have been working with and contributing to Wikidata, its importance has increased to the point where it could become the definitive source of consistent and comprehensive political data globally.
Our intent is to take the deep understanding of the structures and interrelationships of parliaments and politicians around the world which we have gained by working on EveryPolitician and ensure that that is reflected to a much greater extent on Wikidata, working as part of the Wikidata community. We also see the potential of introducing the current community around EveryPolitician to Wikidata.
What is the problem you're trying to solve?
[edit]What problem are you trying to solve by doing this project? This problem should be small enough that you expect it to be completely or mostly resolved by the end of this project. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
There are a large number of groups and individuals around the world who need political data for democratic and accountability initiatives, and much political research is hampered by substantial difficulties in getting access to accurate, complete, consistently formatted data in a timely manner.
Please note: in this proposal we make extensive use of examples using heads of government. This is purely because many useful points can be illustrated in this way, and even at this level, the information in Wikidata is currently inconsistent, erroneous, or simply missing. (Update: we ran a weeklong drive to clean up the Head of Government data through Medium posts, and a Wikiproject, which has now resolved almost all of these issues.) Our ambition is to cover much more than heads of governments, specifically, all current legislators in the target countries.
Wikidata’s unparalleled reach and its supportive community could in principle make it the definitive source of political data globally BUT there are several things to overcome first:
1: Missing data
[edit]Missing items
[edit]From our analysis only about half the national-level politicians in the world currently have Wikidata entries. For other key items, such as electoral districts/constituencies, smaller political parties or factions, legislative terms, cabinet posts, etc. the coverage is even lower.
Much of the value in political data comes not so much from simple information about individual people, but from the connections between items; however, when those individual items do not yet exist it introduces a significant barrier to entering rich data, especially for newcomers to Wikidata.
Missing backlinks
[edit]
Links can often be built in multiple directions. For example, a country can be linked to the office of the head of government (P1313) as well as the person who is head of government (P6). The relevant office item can then also be linked to the office holder (P1308). In the other direction, each politician should be linked to the position held (P39). Ideally, all of these routes would result in the same answer to the question: “who is the head of government in country X?” no matter how it is asked, which is currently not the case.
Missing qualifiers
[edit]Further information also needs to be added to statements via qualifiers. This information is often completely missing, and even when it does exist it is often incomplete. For example, approximately 85% (source) of the “Member of a National Legislature” statements do not even have a single qualifier. However, most uses would require the statements to at least include dates of service.
2: Incorrect or inconsistently entered data
[edit]There are two common ways that data can be wrong:
1) The data is the wrong sort of thing — e.g. someone being the Ministry of Finance rather than the Minister of Finance (as is sometimes the case with records which were created by bots from Wikipedia pages); or setting the electoral district to a geographic area rather than the often identically named legislative constituency.
2) Inconsistent use of properties — e.g. there are at least three common ways of setting what party or faction a legislative membership was on behalf of, and at least as many for which Cabinet a ministerial position was within. In addition, qualifiers like "replaced by" and "followed by" are often used inconsistently or interchangeably. This makes many queries against the data significantly more complex.
(Data can also just be false, for example, saying a person had a role they did not. However, in practice, this error is not common.)
As Wikidata entries are primarily edited and viewed at the level of an individual record, it is difficult to get an overview of the completeness and accuracy of collections of data e.g. all current legislators in a country. This makes it hard for contributors to see where to focus their efforts and to check they are entering data consistently.
3: Keeping data up to date
[edit]Political data changes every day. There is on average one general election every week somewhere around the world, and in a very small handful of countries Wikidata is now updated quite quickly after such large-scale changes. However, this is still rare, and even in those countries with highly active Wikidata editors, individual changes (resignations, substitutions, position changes etc.) during a term, which often do not make national news (never mind international news), are easily overlooked.
Impact of these problems
[edit]With sufficiently complete, accurate, consistent and timely data a lot of things would become significantly simpler.
For example, the question: "What is the gender breakdown of current heads of government across the world?" is not yet possible to answer correctly using Wikidata. (We can think of at least three ways to construct this query, but none of the fields needed are well enough populated for any one of these to yet produce the correct result, never mind all three.) In all but a tiny handful of countries it is not yet possible to ask who the current members of the national legislature, or even the cabinet, are.
We see great potential for Wikidata to become the best source of all this information — removing the need for accountability groups, activists, researchers etc to painstakingly gather this data from disparate and often confusing sources (commonly via screen-scraping). These groups could instead focus their efforts on turning the data into useful tools and activities to improve political transparency and accountability.
What is your solution?
[edit]For the problem you identified in the previous section, briefly describe your how you would like to address this problem. We recognize that there are many ways to solve a problem. We’d like to understand why you chose this particular solution, and why you think it is worth pursuing. Remember to review [Grants:Project/Tutorial|the tutorial]] for tips on how to answer this question.
Our suggested solution is formed of three main approaches:
1. Documentation
[edit]A blocker to improving the quality of the data is the high barrier to entry to edit and maintain political data in Wikidata. Currently, to be able to enter data in a way that would be most useful to consumers of the data, users need to have a solid political background, knowledge of how Wikidata works, and a good understanding of data modelling.
In parallel to the existing efforts to improve general Wikidata documentation, our efforts would primarily address how to enter political data based on particular use cases. For example, we would help provide documentation on Wikidata around common scenarios which would help people to understand the interrelations between data e.g. which steps would you need to take if your country elects a new head of government?
Additionally, we intend to document models for how political data can best be structured for both ease of entering and ease of querying. We have already begun to map some of the existing best practices for modelling political data Parliamentary at: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:EveryPolitician. This still needs to be extended to include information on many other concepts (particularly around executive/cabinet positions, and elections), and made much more accessible to non-expert users.
2. Reports
[edit]The current system of highlighting constraint violations within Wikidata does not allow people with domain knowledge to see problems with data that they might know about, it only highlights issues at the level of a Wikidata property. Our approach is to devise new ways of displaying collections of data which would make it easier to see errors and omissions in the data. An example which highlights how our approach differs is demonstrated by the “Officeholder” report (see version at 2017-05-26). This report provides editors with context to see gaps, i.e. which countries have not been linked to office of the head of government (P1313) and respectively, which offices have not been linked to the person currently occupying them. In addition, we plan on producing contrast reports showing where data has been entered in different ways in different places. See this report (version at 2017-05-26) for example, for existing contradictory data for heads of governments.
3. Automated Prompts
[edit]To help keep the data up to date, we plan to generate automated prompts to notify users of Wikidata when their input is needed. Much of the underlying work for this has already been done: we already maintain a network of over 1,000 scrapers gathering data from a myriad of official sources and parliamentary sites. From these we will signpost and highlight changes in a user-friendly format when information is changed which would need to be updated in Wikidata.
All three approaches are required as the problems can be caused either by missing data, or by missing links; to the end user, it is not always obvious which the problem is until this contrast is provided.
Clarifications on what we are not proposing
[edit]This proposal does not suggest automatically importing data into Wikidata. Instead, the focus is to build tools which facilitate the job of human editors to Wikidata. The decision not to go a fully technical route is based on a combination of factors:
- Sanity checks: A machine cannot decide which of two options is correct. One type of report we will create will flag inconsistencies between data, but it will be up to a human to decide which of the options is correct.
- Community engagement: Engaging with the data at a deep level helps build awareness of the nuances of different fields and difficulties in linking concepts. As the data changes every day, the most likely way to ensure it is maintained is by building on the ownership of data by the community. This is why the proposal stresses that tools will be built to make life easier for human editors, rather than replacing the need for them.
- Legal restrictions: Some countries have database rights which prevent entering a dataset in bulk.
Project goals
[edit]What are your goals for this project? Your goals should describe the top two or three benefits that will come out of your project. These should be benefits to the Wikimedia projects or Wikimedia communities. They should not be benefits to you individually. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
- Wikidata will end up with free, open, well-structured, and consistently modelled data on politicians and legislatures in 30–40 initial countries. This will cover all current (and where available, a significant number of historic) legislators and cabinet-level officials. A model will be put in place to raise this to at least 70 to 80 countries in the months following the project through community support. This data is an essential ingredient for underpinning parliamentary monitoring services, campaigning, anti-corruption and digital democracy initiatives – a key requirement of good governance, transparency and accountability efforts.
- We will improve authority control for political data on Wikidata, enabling many more individuals and organisations to make use of the data.
- We will strive to make information available in a consistent enough manner that tools built to work with data for one country can be easily adapted for others, and simple multi-country analysis becomes possible without spending a long time adjusting scripts to cope with different modelling decisions in different countries.
- (Longer term) Tools and services built on Wikidata’s political data will better allow citizens to interact with their elected representatives. We expect to see many existing or new third-party democracy projects start to make use of the political data in Wikidata.
Project impact
[edit]How will you know if you have met your goals?
[edit]For each of your goals, we’d like you to answer the following questions:
- During your project, what will you do to achieve this goal? (These are your outputs.)
- Once your project is over, how will it continue to positively impact the Wikimedia community or projects? (These are your outcomes.)
For each of your answers, think about how you will capture this information. Will you capture it with a survey? With a story? Will you measure it with a number? Remember, if you plan to measure a number, you will need to set a numeric target in your proposal (e.g. 45 people, 10 articles, 100 scanned documents). Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
Data: By the end of the project Wikidata will have well structured, accurate, consistent data, and up-to-date information on all current (and where available a significant number of historic) legislators and cabinet-level officials, and related concepts such as constituencies, parties/factions, legislative terms, elections, etc, for a minimum of 30 to 40 countries, with the model in place to raise this to at least 70 to 80 countries in the next few months through community support.
Reports: We will create a series of reports to highlight errors, inconsistencies, or omissions in existing political data within Wikidata. We expect to add over 1000 such reports during the project, all of which will continue to be useful indefinitely. An example of a quantifiable impact of the reports can be seen by comparing snapshots at different points in time (for example, we can show the significant effect of our drive to complete the Head of Government information across the world by comparing this report before and after our push — i.e. 40 countries with the missing data entered; 55 where incorrect or out-of-date information was corrected)
Documentation: We will document common use cases such as “What do I need to update when a head of government changes?”, "How do I add historic cabinet positions?", or "How should I enter an election that is both for the president and the legislature?". We will iterate and add to the documentation, learning from common mistakes made by editors when adding the data. We expect to create approximately one significant new piece of use-case-driven documentation per week. This documentation will live on Wikidata where it can be actively maintained beyond the life of this project.
Do you have any goals around participation or content?
[edit]Are any of your goals related to increasing participation within the Wikimedia movement, or increasing/improving the content on Wikimedia projects? If so, we ask that you look through these three metrics, and include any that are relevant to your project. Please set a numeric target against the metrics, if applicable. Remember to review the tutorial for tips on how to answer this question.
Content
[edit]Our primary task will be to establish the core political data for each national government, legislature, and content pages on each politician for each of target counties – this will include structured data on the parliaments, politicians, parties/factions, constituencies, roles, elections, and legislative terms.
Aim: populate a complete dataset of current politicians and related data in each of our 30 to 40 target countries.
Participation
[edit]There are two key groups who are a focus for this project: the existing community around EveryPolitician and the Wikidata community (particularly the parts of it interested in political data). Where possible, we would also introduce the existing EveryPolitician community to Wikidata.
A key element of what we’ve learned from EveryPolitician is the importance of working with partners and community members with local knowledge. mySociety has built its international practice on working with in-country partners – we've developed, and actively support, digital services in over forty countries around the world, always working with a local NGO or campaigning organisation who actually run the services day to day, whilst mySociety provide technical support and training.
A key element of success will be to help the Wikidata political data community and volunteers in each country get to the point that there is both sufficient data to make it worthwhile to maintain, and to provide a steady stream of updates that make it easier to identify what needs to change and when. For a country's data to be maintained and kept up to date we'll need to find local champions from within the community who have the knowledge, time, and motivation to ensure that their country's data is kept up to date.
Aim: identify and support the key community volunteers in each of our 30 to 40 target countries. We estimate that approximately 3 core volunteers will be required in any country where there is insufficient current participation within Wikidata.
Project plan
[edit]Activities
[edit]Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing? What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?
Our proposal involves four stages;
- Generate reports across the target countries to show more clearly the data that already exists for each of the underlying concepts (not just the politicians themselves, but also the legislatures, governments, parties, factions, constituencies, terms, elections, etc). Prerequisite: selecting the 30 to 40 priority countries from our initial list at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:EveryPolitician
- Work with the Wikidata community to populate the dataset, through a combination of individual contributor efforts, and group hackathons, across the initial set of priority counties.
- Adapt our existing suite of parliamentary scrapers, which monitor almost every national legislature in the world, so that instead of feeding data straight into EveryPolitician, they will prompt human editors to ensure that that information is correctly entered into Wikidata.
- Once data is sufficiently complete in each country we will switch EveryPolitician.org to be a Wikidata-driven front-end to it, showing off some of what is possible when consistently modelled political data is available, in a way that is difficult to do within Wikidata itself or even Wikipedias. We will make use of this data through our own services and help other people in more countries do the same.
Budget
[edit]How you will use the funds you are requesting? List bullet points for each expense. (You can create a table later if needed.) Don’t forget to include a total amount, and update this amount in the Probox at the top of your page too!
In order to undertake this change of direction we will need additional short term financial support in order to employ a contract Delivery Manager based in the UK, Event Support both in the UK and some of our priority countries and additional editorial resource to help lead the community efforts in updating the data on Wikidata.
Our total project costs are around £120,000 GBP over the next 4 months to pay for our existing four person EveryPolitician team and support all of the new Wikidata transition effort. We have secured funding of £30,000 from one of our existing donors, we have £50,000 for our existing core funding remaining and are seeking a grant of £40,000 from Wikimedia to make up the shortfall.
(Note: we've updated the budget tasks to better reflect how Wikimedia funds would only be spent on Wikidata tasks, not on external tasks on EveryPolitician following community feedback to this proposal).
The full budget for the whole project over the next four months is;
| Role/Cost Item | Function | Cost/Day (Unit) | Days (Units) | Total | Funder | Funder Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery Manager | Overall Project Management & Delivery | £400 | 75 | £30,000 | Match Funder | £30,000 |
| Senior Developer | Retooling EveryPolitician software to feed into Wikidata | £360 | 50 | £18,000 | mySociety | |
| Developer | Retooling EveryPolitician software to feed into Wikidata | £260 | 50 | £13,000 | mySociety | |
| Junior Developer | Retooling EveryPolitician software to feed into Wikidata | £150 | 50 | £7,500 | mySociety | |
| Partnerships Manager | Ongoing project support and development | £260 | 50 | £13,000 | mySociety | £51,500 |
| Senior Developer | Establish, document and apply model for structuring political data on Wikidata | £360 | 25 | £9,000 | Wikimedia | |
| Developer | Establish, document and apply model for structuring political data on Wikidata | £260 | 25 | £6,500 | Wikimedia | |
| Junior Developer | Documenting data structures and other support tasks on Wikidata | £150 | 25 | £3,750 | Wikimedia | |
| Community Manager | Organising community events and sharing project activity | £240 | 20 | £4,800 | Wikimedia | |
| UK Community Events | Edit-a-thon's and other gatherings to populate country structures + data | £2,000 | 3 | £6,000 | Wikimedia | |
| International Community Events | Support for community events in priority countries | £1,000 | 10 | £10,000 | Wikimedia | £40,050 |
| Total | £121,550 |
Community engagement
[edit]Community input and participation helps make projects successful. How will you let others in your community know about your project? Why are you targeting a specific audience? How will you engage the community you’re aiming to serve during your project?
This project will only be successful in the long run with the active involvement and support from Wikidata community members in each of the priority countries.
mySociety can help by transferring our knowledge of legislature and political data structures over to Wikidata from our work on EveryPolitician, but we will need to support and work with people with local knowledge,experience and judgement.
Working as part of the Wikidata political data community in each country
We will work as part of the Wikidata political data community on best practices for modelling not just politicians but all the surrounding concepts that make this data valuable: legislative terms, constituencies (both geographic and conceptual), political parties and factions, elections, elected vs appointed roles, cabinet and other executive branch positions, etc. across the wide range of different systems that make up the world's national legislatures (based on work of doing exactly that over the last 2 years with EveryPolitician).
It is our hope and assumption that once data is essentially "complete" in many countries, the existing Wikipedia/Wikidata communities of those countries will have significantly more incentive not only to use the information, but to keep it up to date. This will require quite a lot of effort to get this going organically in more than a handful of countries, which is why we’ll prioritise countries with a strong political data community effort and this initiative will give enough of a kickstart to keep everything up to date in the long run.
Finally we'll also encourage the hundreds of people from our existing EveryPolitician user community to start using Wikidata directly, which well help make the most of the people we have already built up relationships with and are expert in the use of such political data in their own fields and bringing more people like ourselves into the Wikidata project. This includes developers, campaigners and academics across out network.
Get involved
[edit]Participants
[edit]Please use this section to tell us more about who is working on this project. For each member of the team, please describe any project-related skills, experience, or other background you have that might help contribute to making this idea a success.
mySociety - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySociety
mySociety is a UK-based charity that invents, and popularises, digital tools and services that enable citizens around the world to exert power over institutions and decision makers.
Founded in 2003, we are recognised as a global pioneer in the use of the internet to help citizens perform civic and democratic tasks - helping establish the Civic Technology sector in the process. We operate across four practice areas: Better Cities, Freedom of Information, Democracy, and Research to determine what creates impact and why.
Today we are one of the most active civic technology organisations in the world, supporting the work of partners in 44 countries, and operating services used by more than 10 million people every year.
Tony Bowden - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Oravrattas
Tony has been with mySociety since 2009. He’s on the road a lot of the time, meeting with groups around the world on our behalf but for the last two years he’s been travelling a little less, because he’s busy leading the EveryPolitician project. EveryPolitician is Tony's brainchild coming from his deep understanding that it's impossible to create services to hold politicians to account if you're not starting with good quality, consistent data.
Before joining mySociety, Tony founded Blackstar, one of the UK's earliest online retailers; built an email search tool that the launch of Gmail made obsolete almost overnight; helped turn around Ireland’s oldest ISP in part by rewriting most of their systems to use Semantic MediaWiki; and worked on merging wikis with spreadsheets at Socialtext.
Chris Mytton - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Chrismytton
Chris joined mySociety as a developer in April 2013. He’s contributed to the Pombola and FixMyStreet projects, and is currently part of the EveryPolitician team.
Before joining mySociety, Chris worked as a freelancer and for various web development agencies.
Oliver Denman - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:ODenman
Oliver joined mySociety in 2016, as a Junior Developer on the EveryPolitician team. He’ll be helping to write the code that enables us to provide useful, structured politician data for activists, developers and researchers around the world.
Mark Cridge - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Markcridge
Mark is Chief Executive of mySociety. He has enjoyed a diverse 20-year digital career including stints as COO at BERG, the technology and design consultancy, and as a senior advisor at Blue State Digital in London. He got his start in 1996 working for a small web design agency in Birmingham before setting up glue London, a digital advertising agency in 1999, going on to become global managing director of Isobar, following glue’s acquisition in 2005.
Lucy Chambers - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Lucyfediachambers
Lucy has joined the EveryPolitician project as a Delivery Manager. She has a background in technology projects at NGOs. Her focus is on ways to break down overwhelming problems into actionable pieces and how to talk about technology so that it is both accessible and inviting. She worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation for many years on a variety of Open Data Projects, starting out as a community coordinator (working in many contexts closely with Wikimedians). She is currently freelance and writes about her learnings in the world of making tech projects accessible at TechtoHuman.com.
Community notification
[edit]Please paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a Village Pump, talk page, mailing list, etc. Need notification tips?
- proposal sent to the Poplus mailing list a global community of 580 civic technologists from over 30 countries. (in this reply post)
- blog post on the mysociety.org site mysociety.org/2017/03/14/help-us-share-everypoliticians-data-where-it-will-make-even-more-impact/
- medium post from 2016 on how we use Wikidata for multilingual names medium.com/@everypolitician/i-use-wikidata-for-multilingual-names-d35b331f1a59#.v1zwov1gh
- post sent to OKFN discussion group discuss.okfn.org/t/help-us-share-data-where-it-will-make-the-most-impact/4841
- posted on CitizenBeta Facebook group facebook.com/groups/citizenbeta/permalink/1293809394035893/
- posted on the mySociety Community Google Group groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!topic/mysociety-community/L5yXZrjPyXc
- posted on the Democracy Club forum groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/democracy-club/aqUos08Ch68
- Discussion on Wikidata Project Chat clarifying relationship between EveryPolitician and Wikidata https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Pay_website_to_make_use_of_Wikidata_.3F
Endorsements
[edit]Do you think this project should be selected for a Project Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project below! (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the discussion page).
- I'm part of the EveryPolitician team so I know how much this work would benefit from being opened out to the whole wikidata community — prior to EveryPolitician I've worked on mySociety parliamentary monitoring projects around the world and have first hand experience of what a costly barrier simply getting basic political data can be. Beholderstories (talk) 15:40, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
- I've worked with Tony Bowden on some of the initial Wikidata modelling for politicians. It's clear that there is a lot of work to be done but also a lot of potential value to be opened up here - this basic data can provide an important infrastructure for building all sorts of useful things. There are already a few small WD projects working at various aspects of this but having someone able to devote the time and energy to pulling this work together, to establish a system for bringing data in from external services, and to help give the community a high-level overview of what's available, would be invaluable.
- The fact that MySociety are able to put up about two thirds of the cost of this suggests that it would be a fairly productive grant in cash terms. From a sustainability perspective, this also offers a way to engage new audiences with Wikidata and hopefully gain more motivated contributors and maintainers from the existing digital civic society communities. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:41, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
- Easy access to consistent data and structured data on politicians would be very helpful 82.4.191.3 02:36, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- Reputable organisation doing vital work, and a good partner for Wikimedia projects. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:25, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- We at Factmata are also interested in tracking political promises and having a dataset of comments and claims by politicians we can a) track and b) automatically fact check. Any project to make this data more linked and structured will add value to all efforts. Dhruvghulati (talk) 11:10, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- Essential work. Great organisation as well. EdSaperia (talk) 12:06, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- What a great idea! MySociety have a strong reputation in the OpenData arena and this gets my support no end. CalzGuy (talk) 12:25, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- No brainer. As users of this data this is something https://represent.me would hugely support, too. eddowding 14:59, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- mySociety are a great provider of services, their reputation in the civic tech community is second to none. Definitely a good partner for Wikimedia. I run Parli-n-grams which uses their data sources heavily, and which would strongly benefit of this proposal. Giuseppe Sollazzo (Talk to Giuseppe) 15:21, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- Indigo Trust have supported MySociety with grants since 2009 and have also supported Wikimedia Foundation. Indigo funds transparency projects in sub-Saharan Africa, where we have developed the concept of the 'Accountability Stack' - the basic information that is necessary for a functioning civil society. A critical part of that stack is widespread public knowledge of who the politicians are - even in the UK this can be hard to find out. EveryPolitician would fill a conspicuous gap. Indigo can attest to MySociety's excellent project delivery track record and efficient use of funds. We commend this proposal. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Wililamperrin (talk • contribs) 16:19, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- I was involved in the setup of Wikidata, and this proposal is very much why we wanted to have a global, free knowledge base that everyone can edit. And I do know MySociety, and they are a reliable partner who will deliver what they promised in this proposal. Pavel Richter
- mySociety are very efficient at this sort of project and it will certainly have widespread use. Francis Davey (talk) 20:36, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- This will give Wikidata a huge boost in an area of great importance to all of all of us! NavinoEvans (talk) 22:00, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
- I'd like to support this project from the Wikidata dev team side. The kind of data being talked about is highly relevant and something we get asked about regularly. We were even thinking about pushing more in this direction over the next year with data partnerships. I am very happy to see that the proposers are already working on Wikidata and seem to have a good understanding of how it works and how they need to be involved in the community. The use of the data in MySociety's projects makes me hopeful that the data will not just be dumped and rot but actually used and maintained in the long run. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:55, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
- This seems to be exactly the sort of useful thing Wikidata is meant for. MySociety have a long track record of doing good things iwth data, and this is only one part of the funding so the risk of simply wasting money is low. Neonchameleon (talk) 15:18, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
- I'm working on a similar project on a much smaller scale (Dicare about French lower house parliamentarians). It seems that mySociety can have the resources to start a global and collaborative work in this domain, that would certainly be of benefit to Wikidata and all Wikimedia projects. -- Envlh (talk) 18:53, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
The proposal matches the WM charter and fits with a practice of importing resources from collaborative organizations. Putting the information in WD makes it more available to the public and could have interesting but unforeseen possibilities. Glrx (talk) 19:22, 21 March 2017 (UTC)- A very interesting proposal which could be used as a model for other organisations John Cummings (talk) 21:35, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
- Last year with reluctance I determined that Wikidata was inconsistent, incomplete and not a reliable resource for data on politicians. EveryPolitician aims to banish these shortcomings to the confines of the revision history tab. Their adoption of the Popolo data structure gives me confidence that the team has the necessary foresight to accomplish their goals. As this project succeeds many civic projects (including the one I work on ClimatePolitics.info) will come to rely on and further improve Wikidata. Antmcgrath (talk) 15:21, 15 August 2017 (UTC)