On 12 March 2018 at 23:23, Yuri Astrakhan <yuriastrak...@gmail.com> 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 _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
