As we’re at the bottom of the list of the countries who were UN Member States since inception, let’s work upwards from there. This gives us Ukraine next.
We have a few new issues here. Firstly, when it joined it was the Ukrainian SSR (I have to admit I’m a little surprised it was a distinct member pre-independence). This gives us a bit of an anachronism, in that Q133356 is listed as having been a member from 1944–1991, but Q212 is also listed as having been a member since October 1945 (with a “subject has role: Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic” qualifier).
Resolving that inconsistency/duplication is out of scope for now, but for simplicity I’m going to treat the two as having been technically separate memberships, and only look at the post-1991 Head of Government data (a brief check suggests that Wikidata doesn’t actually know about anyone having held the Chairman of the
Council of People’s Commissars or Chairman of the Council of Ministers positions anyway).
Another issue is that the Wikipedia table also lists quite a few Acting Prime Ministers, some for reasonably long periods (e.g. Yukhym Zvyahilsky for almost 9 months in 1993/4). My understanding is that the normal practice is to add the person as having held the position (ideally with a “nature of statement: acting” qualifier), so generally we’ll want to count these in our tally. It’s possible that in some countries these will have been entered in Wikidata using a specific “acting Prime Minister” item, or some other way that would complicate things more for us, but we’ll work out how to deal with those if/when we encounter them.
We also have some problematic entries in Wikidata where people who were Prime Minister multiple times have a single “position held” entry, rather than one for each term (see, for example, Vasyl Durdynets). This greatly confuses PositionHolderHistory, but I think the most accurate way to score these is to include overlapping rows there as being only a single entry for the “how many people” count, but count each warning across all of them for the “how many warnings” count.
So this gives us:
- Date of joining: 1991 (exact date doesn’t affect anything)
- Expected count from Wikipedia (all): 24
- Number in Wikidata: 25 (!)
- PositionHolderHistory warnings: 35
- Score: 61/92 (66%)
I’m a little concerned that Wikidata knows about more position holders than Wikipedia (which seems to be down to an extra Yanukovych period), which implies that the scoring system needs adjusted slightly to be able to handle this. But where Wikidata is more correct than Wikipedia, we shouldn’t be flagging that as problematic either. So I think we need to wait to see what other problems come up before deciding what to do.
LATER UPDATE: Updating this post in light of the revised scoring system, I also discovered that Ukrainian Wikipedia has a more comprehensive list than English Wikipedia, so we can also switch to that:
Leave a Reply