Last you heard from from the EveryPolitician team we were talking about integrating EveryPolitician more deeply with Wikidata.

Here’s a quick update on what to expect in the coming months and a note on how you can get involved – we are going to need a lot of help!

Before we can make headway on a deeper integration, there are some pretty foundational pieces of the puzzle we need to put in place.

Some key data is missing, and you may be surprised to discover that it is pretty basic stuff. Take a look at this for example:

This is from a report we have generated to highlight gaps in the links between items. Notice how not even all of the offices have been filled in on the country page, let alone who occupies those offices?

This is the type of foundational data we are hoping to get in place over the next little while, and you can help…

How you can get involved

Over the coming weeks we’re going to be conducting a few experiments in public and trying to get data into Wikidata. We’ll need as much help as we can get!

The experiments will focus on using Wikidata to attempt to answer some questions we find interesting and see how we can expose gaps and inconsistencies in the data. In doing this, we’ll be pointing to specific reports we have generated and asking you to help us fill in the gaps.

Our first question will be:

“What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?”

We’ll be blogging about the investigation over on Medium. The first post is already there:

Help us find the offices of heads of governments across the world!

Keen to dive straight in? Help us fill in the blanks you see in this report! If you are familiar with Wikidata, you will probably be able to get started straight away, but there are also tips and pointers in the Medium post if you want a bit more guidance.

You can get notified of the challenges to complete the data as soon as they are published by following the EveryPolitician bot on Twitter.

Want even more details on our plans?

We should also mention that we’ve updated our proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation to make a couple of things clearer about the problem we are trying to solve and our proposed solution (the proposal is still being reviewed). If you are interested in the nitty-gritty, that’s the best place to get the full overview of what we are planning.

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Image: Dylan (CC by/2.0)