To accurately assess how complete the Wikidata information is, we need something to compare against. PositionHolderHistory can certainly tell us that there are obvious gaps, but it can’t know how many people actually held the office during them. To keep things simple we’re going to use English Wikipedia as our point of comparison.
This will not involve taking any of the information from Wikipedia and entering it into Wikidata, or even checking that Wikidata has the same dates etc for each person: this is solely about getting a count of how many people have been the Head of Government of each country within the relevant time period. Wikipedia tends to provide a fairly straightforward table of officeholders for positions like this. The format of that table will differ significantly from country to country, but counting the number of rows since that country joined the UN should hopefully be relatively straightforward in the majority of cases.
Wikidata can even help direct us to where that information lives in Wikipedia in most cases: usually it will either be on a “List of of “-type of page, or else on the page for the office itself. So let’s try to find the most likely candidate in our master SPARQL query:
https://gist.github.com/tmtmtmtm/98ab6ad3e108bb6f45a33a4a7a742c17
All but four of our 202 entries now also has an associated Wikipedia page. The four currently missing (Supreme Protector of the Peru–Bolivian Confederation, Prime Minister of Botswana, Governor of Liechtenstein, and President of the Council of Ministers of the Russian SFSR) can be investigated when we get to each of those countries. There are almost certainly other cases where the relevant table lives somewhere different, but hopefully those won’t be particularly hard to find, and we can always update the Wikidata pointers as we come across them.
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