Wikidata:WikiProject British Politicians/constituencies

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The data model is set up in such a way that a single constituency corresponds to a particular time period. If a constituency has existed for two distinct periods under the same name, then it will have two distinct items with distinct start and end dates. Wikipedia tends to have a policy of merging by name - constituencies with the same name at different periods are placed in the same article, regardless of any boundary changes, while constituencies with substantially different names but essentially the same boundaries are brought together. For the time being, the approach we have used here is to split the Wikidata entries to allow accurate start/end dates, but to help reusers find the relevant Wikipedia article, these are crosslinked to the most recent instantiation of the constituency, the one with the Wikipedia sitelink. Where a seat has existed since before 1801, items for the English, GB, and UK constituencies are split out separately.

So for example, the MPs for Reading would be associated with the following items:

• Reading (Q60578270), two-member seat in the English Parliament up to 1707
• Reading (Q111902551), two-member seat in the British Parliament 1707-1801
• Reading (Q56166277), two-member seat in the UK Parliament 1801-1885
• Reading (Q42890987), single-member seat 1885-1950
• Reading North (Q42891026) & Reading South (Q42891012), single-member seats 1950-55
• Reading (Q7300456) single-member seat 1955-74
• Reading North (Q7300532) & Reading South (Q7300564), single-member seats 1974-83
• Reading East (Q1032131) & Reading West (Q1032106), single-member seats 1983-date

Because of limitations with labels, constituencies may have anachronistic names, particularly if the name has changed over time, or if an unofficial form is commonly used rather than the official one. (This is particularly the case for geographical divisions of counties - South Essex or Essex South). However, it should be clear which seat is meant.

Properties

Constituency articles should ideally have:

general data

• a clear description with dates, if relevant
• instance of (P31):constituency of the House of Commons (Q27971968) or other as appropriate
• country (P17):United Kingdom (Q145) or other as appropriate
• inception (P571) (date of their first election)
• dissolved, abolished or demolished date (P576) (date of last dissolution if they no longer exist, else not present)
• located in the administrative territorial entity (P131)
• different from (P1889) - if appropriate, linking to the current constituency with the Wikipedia article
• replaces (P1365) - the seat[s] that it replaced
• replaced by (P1366) - if dissolved, the seat[s] that replaced it
• number of seats in assembly (P1410) - the number of MPs returned by the seat; one for all modern seats, two for most historical ones, occasionally three or four. Should have a legislative body (P194) qualifier.

geographical data

• shares border with (P47) (only present on a small share of items)
• locator map image (P242) - check this covers that particular instance of the constituency and not one with another name
• coordinate location (P625)
• geoshape (P3896) if available - at the moment not many are available due to licensing issues on Commons for OGL data
• KML file (P3096) if available

identifiers

• Vision of Britain unit ID (P3615)
• GSS code (2011) (P836) for recent seats
• TOID (P3120) for recent seats
• UK Parliament thesaurus ID (P4527) for recent seats

Picking the coordinate location (P625) coordinates for a constituency is always a bit of an arbitrary process, since they do not have a natural "centre", but a good compromise is to use either the approximate geographic centrepoint or the centrepoint of the largest area of population. Many historic constituencies have had coordinates imported from the most recent instantiation.

For future work

For historic constituencies, sponsor (P859) may be useful to identify the patron of historic rotten/pocket boroughs, with date qualifiers where appropriate. Similarly, voting system (P8196) may be useful to identify the voting method used in particular seats, which historically was very variable between different types of seat and different areas.

proposed constituency of the House of Commons (Q122624393) can be used to identify future constituencies (eg after a boundary review) that have not yet come into existence.

Queries and reports

All constituencies used in a UK MP article (since 1801)

SELECT DISTINCT ?constituency ?constituencyLabel ?typeLabel ?start ?end ?members ?article
{
 ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5 ; p:P39 ?positionStatement .
 ?positionStatement ps:P39 ?mpterm . ?mpterm wdt:P279 wd:Q16707842 .
 ?positionStatement pq:P768 ?constituency . 
 OPTIONAL { ?constituency wdt:P31 ?type . }
 OPTIONAL { ?constituency wdt:P571 ?start . }
 OPTIONAL { ?constituency wdt:P576 ?end . }
 OPTIONAL { ?constituency wdt:P1410 ?members . }
 OPTIONAL { ?article schema:about ?constituency . ?article schema:isPartOf <https://en.wikipedia.org/>. }
  # find any where the WP link is on that item
 OPTIONAL { ?constituency wdt:P1889 ?different . ?article schema:about ?different . ?article schema:isPartOf <https://en.wikipedia.org/>. }
  # find any where the WP link is on a different item (usually the most modern instantiation)
 SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language 'en' }
}

Try it!

Identifiers for constituencies

select distinct ?item ?itemLabel ?start ?end ?gss_id ?toid ?parl_id ?thes_id ?osm
where
{
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q27971968 .
  # 2261 entries as of 3/6/23 
  optional { ?item wdt:P571 ?start } optional { ?item wdt:P576 ?end }
  optional { ?item wdt:P836 ?gss_id } 
  # 729x have a GSS ID, all current or ended 2010 - 1220x IDs - current are preferred
  optional { ?item wdt:P3120 ?toid } 
  # 632x have a TOID, 1x per GB seats
  optional { ?item wdt:P6213 ?parl_id }
  # 650x have a UK Parliament linked-data ID, all current
  optional { ?item wdt:P4527 ?thes_id }
  # 811x have a Parliament thesaurus ID, current + dissolved since 1997 + a couple of others that may need checking
  optional { ?item wdt:P402 ?osm }
  # 31x have an OSM relation ID
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

Try it!