Re: [Wikidata] Election data

2018-03-14 Thread Hector Perez
I'm also interested in improving voting records. On agreelist.org we are
creating a database of who does and who does not support issues such as
basic income, carbon tax, AI risks, etc. (not only politicians though), but
one thing is what people say and another one what they vote.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 3:09 PM, Tony Bowden  wrote:

> On 12 March 2018 at 23:23, Yuri Astrakhan  wrote:
> > 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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Re: [Wikidata] Election data

2018-03-14 Thread Tony Bowden
On 12 March 2018 at 23:23, Yuri Astrakhan  wrote:
> 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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