This is very helpful, but will produce lots of warnings that you can ignore, in particular:
To do this, you should make sure that the item has at least one of the following:
There might already be an appropriate subclass of ‘legislator’ to use; for example, for the United Kingdom there is ‘member of parliament’ Q486839, which is a subclass of ‘legislator’. We don’t recommend extending the subclass hierarchy under ‘legislator’ Q4175034 unnecessarily, though.
This should be the same as for the house item.
Again, this should be the same as for the house item.
For most countries this should be straightforward, but sometimes you’ll have to be careful about cases like Denmark vs Kingdom of Denmark. (For subnational legislatures, just copy what the national level legislatures use.)
For national level legislatures, this will be the whole country (the same one as the P17 typically) but for subnational legislatures (e.g. Brandenburg Landtag Q521764) that would be Brandenburg (Q1208).
At this point you should also make sure that the place item you’ve used as the value here also has a ‘legislative body’ (P194) statement back to this legislature item.
Depending on whether it’s unicameral or bicameral this will be one of:
For each of the houses of a bicameral legislature:
… with the same properties as above.
This should be either to:
At least this should include:
FIXME: note that we still need to settle on how to model names for display. For example, we might want to use the property called something like “name in a particular source”, so we could say “this is how they’re referred to in the Scottish Parliament” / “this is how they’re referred to in the House of Lords.
If this is a unicameral legislature, the only house will usually be the item for the legislature, otherwise you need to take these steps for each house in the bicameral legislature.
Often, particularly for subnational legislatures, this will need to be added.
If there is one there that’s out of date (now different) then:
In the simple case, the seat count will have never changed, or have been the same for a long time.
This should be done in the same manner as making sure the ‘number of seats’ P1342 is correct.
For example, this might be ‘Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom’ Q16707842. If you need to create this, follow the guide in file:wikidata-legislator-position-guide.org
This has to be an image on Wikimedia commons
You can add multiple language links, each with a language qualifier where there different URLs for different languages.
n.b. This only applies if the legislature is term-based!
For each term you’ll be adding membership data for, you need to:
For example, ‘57th United Kingdom Parliament’ Q29974940.
This P31 statement should have the following qualifiers:
This might be to a bicameral legislature as a whole, if both houses use the same terms, or to a single house if they’re not in sync.
For example, the 57th Parliament of the United Kingdom should have a ‘series ordinal’ of 57 on the P31. In countries that don’t number their terms, this shouldn’t be added.
This should be the date that that parliamentary term started. (Note that only rarely would this be the election date: usually the inauguration of the parliament is on a different day, and that’s the date that should be used.)
This should have as a value the preceding term.
This should have as a value the succeeding term.
Any election from which the people we’re trying to add should be created. This usually means a general election, but might also mean you have to create by-elections (say) between general elections.
In most cases there will a legislature-specific subclass of ‘legislative election’. For example, in the United Kingdom the election item should typically be an instance of either ‘United Kingdom general election’ (Q15283424) or ‘UK Parliamentary by-election’ (Q7864918).
If the election takes place on a single day, then use ‘point in time’ (P585). If it takes place over multiple consecutive days, then use ‘start time’ (P580) and ‘end time’ (P582) statements. If it’s on multiple distinct days, then use multiple ‘point in time’ (P585) statements.
Warning: people commonly misunderstand this; e.g. you might see ‘Prime Minister’ when the election is actually for Members of Parliament. You don’t need to delete this kind of error if you see it, but make sure you add the right statement.
This should have:
Warning: this should be how the constituency would be referred to, even it’s shared with other items. For example, the label for the UK parliamentary constituency of Cambridge should just be ‘Cambridge’. The description, however, should disambiguate it from other items with label ‘Cambridge’, in particular so that you can tell them apart in autocomplete.
In most cases this statment’s value should be a legislature specific subclass of ‘constituency’ (Q192611), like ‘constituency of the Parliament of the United Kingdom’ (Q27971968)
If there is an existing item representing the highest level administrative subdivision under the areas associated with this chamber overall, then set that as the value of a P131 statement.
As before, this should have a label in each official language of the country and one in English.
In this simplest case, this might be an instance of ‘political party’ (Q7278) or ‘parliamentary group’ (Q848197). However, some countries will already be using a country-specific subclass of one of those items, in which case that should be used instead.
A subtlety to be aware of in the modelling of political factions in Wikidata, is that for legislatures, new parliamentary groups will be created for each parliamentary term, even if their makeup is the same as in the previous term.
As another warning, it’s worth taking time to investigate how political parties and parliamentary groups have already been modelled in a particular country or legislature in order to keep consistent with that.
This is the colour typically associated with this party / group, which is very useful for visualizing the makeup of parliamentary chambers, etc. It’s best for this to be a precise enough colour to be unique among parties likely to be represented concurrently!
For each person who is a member of the legislature:
This should be a photograph in Wikimedia Commons.
If a property exists for their membership of the legislature (usually an ID of some kind) that should be added. See file:creating-parliamentary-id-properties.org
For each person who is a member of the legislature:
This should have the following qualifiers: (warning: note that you should create a new P39 statement the value of any of these qualifiers will change)
This should only be added if their membership has ended, e.g. if it’s historic.
If this is just because the term has ended, this would be ‘dissolution of parliament’ (Q741182) but might also be:
… or various other events.