Wikidata talk:WikiProject British Politicians

MPs as Special Advisers (and other jobs I suppose)

Someone raised this the other day and I thought it might be a good area for enrichment. I've added Ed Miliband's SPAD roles using the "of" qualifier to denote who they were advising.

Any ideas for how this could be done better, or does this seem ok for now? Battleofalma (talk) 10:51, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

@Battleofalma: sorry I missed this comment! I think this looks good - my only qualm is whether SPADs are technically appointed to advise a minister (eg Brown) or a department (eg the Treasury). Either way I think we could definitely make good use of this. Andrew Gray (talk) 09:30, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Constituencies

I've been playing a bit with constituencies and located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) this week, trying to see if we can answer questions like "how many MPs for Scottish seats did XYZ". At the moment, it's a bit complicated. There are a few different approaches possible:

1. Use a standardised high-level P131. We do this for most contemporary seats - places are in "Scotland", "Wales", "Northern Ireland", or one of the ITL 1 statistical regions of England (Q6955655). (And some historic -a ll 1801-1922 Irish seats (including pre-1922 NI) are in Ireland (Q57695350).)
2. Use a very granular approach - so West Suffolk (Q874416) would be in Suffolk (Q23111), not East of England (Q48006) - and go down as low as is practical (to town level)
3. A hybrid approach - use a standardised hierarchy but more granular than NUTS regions - probably at county level. This seems universally the best solution for pre-1832 seats.

Approach #1 is straightforward, and allows for efficient searching. However, it does not convey all the information we might want (we can get "all MPs from London" but not "...from Birmingham"). Approach #2 is much more precise, but queries involving P131* have a habit of timing out so might not be a practical solution. Approach #3 should be more efficient, and hopefully adaptable, but could end up being a maintenance headache to keep things consistent.

In all cases, we have issues of anachronism - eg English regions didn't meaningfully exist before the 1990s, and all the counties changed in 1974, so potentially somewhere like Penrith and The Border (Q1050693) could be classed three different ways (North-West, Cumbria, Cumberland). Start and end dates are probably the only way forward here.

Is there a fourth approach that I'm missing? Andrew Gray (talk) 09:57, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Handily, the Commons Library has just put out a related dataset covering 1918-2017 elections; they assign English seats to both contemporary counties and to modern regions - there is a caveat that pre-1974 counties don't map very cleanly onto regions in all cases, but they've helpfully made some determinations about edge cases. If we do want to use modern regions, this could be a way to map them even further back.

For non-English seats, these are only recorded at country level. Andrew Gray (talk) 10:35, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

Mismatched election dates vs start times

In my slow tidy-up of historic by-elections, I noticed this morning that Denis MacShane (Q695061) was mistakenly first elected in the 1963 Rotherham by-election (Q16999906), rather than 1994 Rotherham by-election (Q17020044), so thought I'd check for anyone else who was elected in a different year than their start date:

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?start_time ?election_date WHERE {
  ?item p:P39 ?ps .
  ?ps ps:P39/wdt:P279 wd:Q16707842 .
  ?ps pq:P2715 ?election .
  ?ps pq:P580 ?start_time .
  ?election wdt:P585 ?election_date .
  FILTER (YEAR(?start_time) != YEAR (?election_date))
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

Try it!

Not much to tidy up, thankfully, but this is potentially a useful query to keep an eye on from time to time. --Oravrattas (talk) 09:25, 13 May 2020 (UTC)