Wikidata:WikiProject Government/Report/Switzerland

Starting the project

When we got the project, we thought about which country we wanted to work with. We thought directly about our neighboring country Switzerland. First, their government directory has not been included yet. Second, Switzerland is a neutral and environmentally friendly country. It is very famous for its cheese variety and swiss chocolate is famous around the globe. We also thought that most of Switzerland supports the German language. This however was only partly true.

Preparation / Gathering information

As a first step, we researched the political system of Switzerland. We wanted to find out which different levels of administration Switzerland has and how it is structured for each level. Switzerland is a democratic federal republic state and since 1948, it is also known as the Swiss Confederation. There are four levels of administration in Switzerland: the Confederation level, the canton level, the district level and the commune level. To look up for units in each level, we used the official website of Swiss government. On the official website of the Confederation level, there are seven departments in the federal council including all of its subsidaries. There are 26 cantons in Switzerland. For the administration unit of each canton, we use the search term on Google: "[Canton's name] + Behörden". With this search term, we can find the official website of each canton government and look up for its authority departments.

We planned to complete the first 2 levels of the government agency. After that, if there is some time left, we can continue with the last 2 levels.

Official Websites

The following are the official websites of the swiss government which we used for collecting data.

• Confederation level: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start.html

• Cantons level:

• Zürich
• Bern
• Lucerne
• Uri
• Schwyz
• Obwalden
• Nidwalden
• Glarus
• Zug
• Fribourg
• Solothurn
• Basel-City
• Basel-Country
• Schaffhausen
• Appenzell A.Rh.
• Appenzell I.Rh.
• Sankt Gallen
• Grisons
• Aargau
• Thurgau
• Ticino
• Vaud
• Valais
• Neuchâtel
• Geneva
• Jura

Approach

At first it was necessary to get an overview of how the Swiss Government was structured for estimating the amount of work involved and creating self-sufficient tasks that we could divide among the three of us. For the modeling we were inspired by the example of Germany, where very extensive examples were given.

Since using the UI of Wikidata became tiring in the long run, we toyed with the idea of using quick statements. In short, it didn't suit all of us, because at that time we already had good muscle memory with the UI, and we encountered some problems while working with quick statements (more below). Furthermore, it was easier to search for qualitative information in one of the official languages (e.g. German), which is why some of us also set the Wiki UI to German to create synergies.

We had to evaluate to what degree authorities were already listed and to what extent the available information was sufficient for our use case. This assessment was particularly relevant in regard to writting the queries. Then we followed the top-down approach and tried to add the state level authorities first before continuing with the next level. We found out that some of authorities already existed at the state level and added metadata to the existing entries.

We removed data that was incorrect or no longer represented the current state. One example was the Swiss Foundation for Research of Gemstones, which was listed as a sub-authority of a department. Unfortunately, there was no metadata for this statement that showed us in which period this authority was supposed to have been a sub-authority of the department, and we could not find any information on the official websites about it. The reference page for this statement also resulted in a dead page, which is why the entry was eventually removed. This problem led us to discuss whether, when adding entries or statements, the period should not be given as metadata, and a web archive should be made of the source, since in general the organizational structure of a country is subject to constant change. We finally decided against it because it would be too extensive and would exceed the time frame we have available.

A question that was derived was: If we add an authority, what information should be included at a minimum? Should the opening hours, the geographical location or the leading persons of the authorities be listed? We concluded that most of the information was undergoing constant change. Opening hours can vary from year to year, agencies can change their geographic location or merge with other agencies, and even the names of the agencies we cannot claim will always remain the same (German example: Beuth Hochschule, now Berliner Hochschule). We agreed to assume the following statements when adding authorities:

• instance of
• country
• applies to jurisdiction
• official website

It was up for discussion to make a statement proposal describing a specific circumstance that applies only to Switzerland on second lvl agencies. We decided against it, on the grounds that on the one hand, the chances of success for accepting this specific property were low, and on the other hand, we found a generic statement that mapped the circumstance and was sufficient for us.

Furthermore, we defined other entries that served as properties of statements:

• Government Agency of Switzerland
• Cantonal Authority

Where Government Agency of Switzerland is a subclass of Agency and Canthon Authority is a subclass of Government Agency of Switzerland.

We also tried to add Switzerland to the official govdirectory website. Our pull request on Github is pending.

Problems and questions to discuss

One of the first problems we encountered were semi-protected Items. At the beginning we couldn't edit already existing Items which made progress difficult for us. We continued with other items for the time being and edited the semi protected ones when we were allowed to edit them.

The country Switzerland has 4 official languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Therefore gathering Information could sometimes be a challenge. While the big state level agencies all offer websites in english, the canton level agencies don't offer english websites. This was no problem for cantons who support the German language. However some cantons don't support English or German on their website. Therefore we had to use a translator to gather some Information.

When adding the different agencies of each cantons we realized that many canton agencies have similar agencies with similar names. We had to think about a way to differentiate between the different canton agencies. For one we created different descriptions, which also appear when searching for them, and we also added the canton names to the name of the items as well.

When checking if some items already exist, we used the search function of the form for creating new items. This search for items is static and only returns items which have the exact same name. One time we checked if "The Federal Department of Justice and Police (FDJP)" already existed and we didn't get a result in return and created the item. Later we realized that the item already exists under the name "Federal Department of Justice and Police" (without the "The"). We are now aware that the inclusion of "The" in an item title is not good practice. However we think this example displays the problem we sometimes encountered. When we wanted to delete the wrongly created item we have to send a deletion request which is in some cases and in our opinion unnecessary. We think a user should be able to create delete their own unedited item within a short time period to counter the collection of redundant and wrong items. WiseWoman kindly created an entry in the "Suggestions for improving Wikidata" section of our project.

Problem with quick statement tool

While trying out the Quick Statement tool, we found that we also need to finish the script manually by entering the data into the script by hand. Also, for each statement, we need to specify the Q number for the subject (subject + predicate + object). In summary, the amount of time it takes us to complete the script is almost equal to the amount of time it takes using the Wikidata web interface. In addition, after entering a few items through the interface, we had developed muscle memory for inputting the data. Another problem with using Quick Statements tool was that we felt the usability (UX) of the tool was weak. It did not show us the exact error in our script, only that it contained errors. We tried to figure out where the errors were, and eventually we gave up on the tool. Maybe Quick Statement is just not the appropriate tool in our case.

Queries

Government agencies

• Query for all Government agencies of Switzerland (should be 72) Y

Federal Council

• Query for all Departments of the Federal Council (should be 7) Y

Cantons of Switzerland

• Query of all cantons (should be 26) Y

All Subdepartments of all Swiss Cantons

• Query of all canton departments

All Cantons with corresponding agencies

• Query Canton of Zürich
• Query Canton of Bern
• Query Canton of Lucerne
• Query Canton of Uri
• Query Canton of Schwyz
• Query Canton of Obwalden
• Query Canton of Nidwalden
• Query Canton of Glarus
• Query Canton of Zug
• Query Canton of Fribourg
• Query Canton of Solothurn
• Query Canton of Basel-City
• Query Canton of Basle-Country
• Query Canton of Schaffhausen
• Query Canton of Appenzell A. Rh.
• Query Canton of Canton of Appenzell I. Rh.
• Query Canton of Sankt Gallen
• Query Canton of Grisons
• Query Canton of Aargau
• Query Canton of Thurgau
• Query Canton of Ticino
• Query Canton of Vaud
• Query Canton of Valais
• Query Canton of Neuchâtel
• Query Canton of Geneva
• Query Canton of Jura

Added & Updated Entries

You can check the added Entries with the Queries. Most of the cantons and some state level agencies already existed. The rest however was all added by us. We also added some items for describing the relations to other items. For example Canton authorities for the relation instance of.

Conclusion & Retrospective

In Retrospective we are happy with our choice to select Switzerland for this Project. While some information was tiresome to collect due to the language barrier of some cantons, general information about the structure of the Swiss government was easy to find and easy to understand. However gathering, inserting and proofing data all at once could sometimes be a little tiresome. Not including the flaws of wikidata we mentioned before we are glad however to have an overall good impression of Wikidate. After a short period of time we figured out how to work with the platform and it also gives a lot of support in some areas. For example writing queries was really easy due to the UI and it's feedback when generating an error. We also have to mention the community on wikidata. While we think it depends on the project, it was nice to know that we are not alone and that we are in fact contributing to something bigger. We want to especially mention User Ainali who gave feedback on Wikidata and on the Govdirectory Github page.

While it felt good to contribute to a bigger project, it remains to be seen how and for what the added data can be used for in the future. The posibilietis are definetly there and we are excited to monitore future development, especially for the country Switzerland.