Ideally all the information for each country would be complete, consistent, and correct. But finding a trustworthy source for each country to check against, and then comparing each entry in Wikidata against that is a lot of work. So we’re going to take a few shortcuts here, primarily by focussing on the first two elements: completeness and consistency. It’s certainly possible that Wikidata could be complete and consistent, but still wrong, but as due to the “double-entry” nature of each P39 ‘position held’ statement pointing at the previous holder and next holder, looking for obvious gaps or mismatches — e.g. a ‘followed by’ statement with a mismatched or missing ‘follows’, or someone having a ‘start date’ earlier than their predecessor’s ‘end date’ — this much simpler check is likely to be Good Enough for an initial version.
Thankfully we already have a tool that will show us everyone who has held a given office, and provide exactly that sort of consistency checking: PositionHolderHistory.
So, for example, Wikidata’s current knowledge on historic Presidents of Argentina.
So now we need to update our SPARQL to see each country’s Head of Government position(s). Where a country has changed what office the Head of Government holds, we’ll need to know each of them, but only back as far as the date they joined the UN:
https://gist.github.com/tmtmtmtm/0479786d46ed103ad47013e19cde9a71
Currently that gives 202 results for the 193 countries, which I suspect is lower than it should be (i.e. Wikidata doesn’t yet know about some of the historic offices). I don’t know of any source that would tell what that figure should be, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens when we look at each country in turn.
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