This is a belated post accompanying a talk at WikidataCon 2017 and providing some of the key links to the things mentioned in the talk.
While the title states that this is a post about political data, much is applicable to other domains on Wikidata. I hope this will be of use to people working on issues such as data completeness and data consistency while working on other topics.
We need to find ways to make it easier for domain experts who are not Wikidata experts to edit the data. Listeria combined with wd_edit may be useful tools for this as they allow users to edit simple tables directly in context.
A common challenge for users and editors of Wikidata is how to approach data quality, completeness and accuracy. Prompts offer one approach by allowing people to easily compare the output of a SPARQL query with a reference CSV file.
Some of the power user tools for use on Wikidata don’t work for certain types of political data. For example, QuickStatements is a useful tool to update data in bulk. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for a very common scenario in politics — when people have held the same position more than once. The PositionStatements bot performs a very similar role to QuickStatements, except that it can add a role even if someone previously held it.
Looking for a simple task to get involved? If your country uses unique identifier to refer to individual politicians in databases, make sure there is a property for that identifier in Wikidata so that the records can be matched up to external data sources.
