Well structured political data for the whole world: impossible utopia, or Wikidata at its best? - Lucy Chambers & Tony Bowden (MySociety)
Recorded by Chaos Computer Club on Saturday 28 October 2017 for WikidataCon 2017 at the Tagesspiegel, Berlin.
Original source: https://media.ccc.de/v/wikidatacon2017-10035-well_structured_political_data_for_the_whole_world_impo...

Presenters:

• Lucy Chambers [email protected]
• Tony Bowden 

In July 2017, the EveryPolitician team set out to get consistent data for politicians for 30-40 countries. So how did that go?

We’ll talk you through the tactics we deployed — from running online “missions” to generating reports to highlight which data was missing.

Not every approach was wildly successful, but some were far more successful than we had expected! We’ll share what we learned and showcase what can now be achieved with the political information in Wikidata — then discuss our ideas for the next steps.

If you have plans to head up a drive to get data — of any kind — into Wikidata, we have pointers that should save you time and effort. And if you’re specifically interested in political data, there will also be much to interest you.

What will viewers take away from this session?

Viewers will learn:

1. The various methods we tried in order to get this data into Wikidata: what worked, and what we’d do differently next time.
2. Considerations and challenges of treading the balance between automation and manual entry.
3.  What are the main difficulties in trying to capture the messy reality of politics in a structured form?

They will also see all kinds of fun queries which are now possible because we have data for them in Wikidata.