Hi Matt, The information on historical MPs came from the digitisation of old Hansard carried out by Parliament, which you can find at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ . Party only started to be displayed in Hansard at the start of the 2003-04 session, hence why the project did not include any party information. It is currently included in the parlparse project ( http://ukparse.kforge.net/parlparse/ seems okay here), yes, but added by us.
I imagine Wikipedia will have accurate information for MP party membership. If you collated the information (preferably indexed by the person ID that we use on the site for ease of matching), then we can get it added easily enough; email it to to the address given on the contact page. The only issue is due to the current underlying model of MPs on parlparse/TheyWorkForYou, party changes within a Parliament involve creating a new member entry, which is awkward and has a number of knock-on effects to do with speaker matching etc., so sadly if there's anything too complicated it might have to wait until we have the resources to fix that (which might involve using Popit, which is currently being worked on: http://www.mysociety.org/2012/07/04/mysocietys-components-strategy-our-take-on-small-pieces-loosely-joined/ ). ATB, Matthew On 6 Jul 2012, at 08:04, Matt Ford wrote: > TheyWorkForYou doesn't have information about MP's party membership prior to > 1997, is this information from the ParlParse project (which incidentally > seems to be down at the moment)? > > Either way I think it would be good if we could have accurate information on > historic party membership for at least all serving MPs, surely this > information should be available somewhere? > > If I were able to collate the information to whom would I need to send it? _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
