One of the key goals of this project is to give each country some sort of score for how good the information in Wikidata currently is, which we can then check again later to see if it has improved. This is always going to have some degree of subjectivity in at least some cases, and whatever we choose is likely to be contentious, especially as we need something that’s relatively easy to calculate. It’s also likely that whatever we choose will fail to reflect some special cases somewhere (some country will always do things very differently to everywhere else), but as a first stab, we’ll want to know:
- How many people have been Head of Government in the relevant time frame?
- How many of those does Wikidata know about?
- How complete and consistent are the P39 (position held) statements in each case (do they all have start/end dates and predecessor/successor information)?†
Other than the current officeholder (who won’t have a successor or end date), and first officeholder (where any predecessor, or even this person’s period in office before joining the UN, is out of scope for this project), each of the expected P39 statements can therefore score 4 points (2 points for the first and last).
So each country will have an expected/maximum score of (four times the expected number of officeholders) minus four (for the first/last person), and an actual score of (four times the number present in Wikidata) minus four (for the first/last) minus the number of warnings PositionHolderHistory gives, which we can than express as a completeness percentage.
We might need to adjust something later based on whatever we find when we start to look at each country in turn, but let’s see where this approach takes us.
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† For now we’ll ignore all the other common qualifiers found on the Position Held statements — series ordinal, end cause, etc
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