Wikidata talk:WikiProject US legislation

Existing data

There are a lot of US legislation already in Wikidata, coming from Wikipedia and Wikisource mostly. See Category:United States federal law (Q6935146) and Category:United States legislation (Q6463679). It would be good to focus on fixing those first, ensuring they have wikidata items with unique identifiers so that the import from Sunlight Foundation's database does not create duplicates. John Vandenberg (talk) 01:18, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

• John Vandenberg, I think that's a good idea. Sunlight's API only goes back to 2009, so that limits the task considerably. Our hackathon has now wrapped up, and our proposed crosswalk between their API and Wikidata is about 90% complete, so I'm going to write it up nicely on this page. I'm looking forward to your thoughts.—Neil P. Quinn (talk) 23:09, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Notability and statements

I'm wondering whether it is really necessary to have items for *each* introduced bill. Do we have an idea how many that would be? Are they all notable enough? Maybe I'm overconcerned as a Belgian, where billions of bills are constantly passed :) I would also want to make sure that we have wider consensus/guidelines on which statements to use for legislation; I do not see for example legislated by (P467) or applies to jurisdiction (P1001) mentioned on the page; or as to what value instance of (P31) needs. SPQRobin (talk) 17:39, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Launch of WikiProject Wikidata for research

Hi, this is to let you know that we've launched WikiProject Wikidata for research in order to stimulate a closer interaction between Wikidata and research, both on a technical and a community level. As a first activity, we are drafting a research proposal on the matter (cf. blog post). It would be great if you would see room for interaction! Thanks, --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 01:48, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016

Only this week left for comments: Wikidata:Wikimania 2016 (Thank you for translating this message). --Tobias1984 (talk) 12:03, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Wider WikiProject

Hi @Harej, Neil P. Quinn, Angai369, TaraInDC, Chandler Wiland, Econterms:,

I'm thinking about creating a Wikidata:WikiProject France/legislation and I was looking for other examples and advices.

I didn't find a general Wikidata:WikiProject legislation, wouldn't it worth to create it? Even if legislation are differents from one country to an other, I fell that there is a lot of things that can be shared in a common WikiProject. What do you think, does anybody want to help?

Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 07:49, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: I think creating a general wikiproject is a good idea! This project has been totally inactive since the hackathon in 2014 where it got started. I'm still interested, though, and an active project would probably help me to get started again. And the more general a project is, the more likely it is to stay alive :)—Neil P. Quinn (talk) 19:54, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

29 CFR 1910.1200

I see that this project is inactive, but maybe someone has this page on watchlist and would be able to help me. I need to add an item about 29 CFR 1910.1200, it's needed for safety classification and labelling (P4952). There is Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations (Q17145295), but I don't know which properties I should use in new item and how it should be linked to existing item(s?). Is there any item which could serve as an example? Wostr (talk) 23:16, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Reviving Wikidata:WikiProject US legislation

@Harej:, @Neil P. Quinn:, @Econterms: Hello all. Please join me in reviving Wikidata:WikiProject US legislation. There remains much to accomplish. -- Oa01 (talk) 18:28, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Early legislation

@Oa01 @Harej@Neil P. Quinn @Econterms

I've made a start (the first 5 or so, so far) at trying to actually "document" the Acts of the 1st Congress... I'm trying to be as "tendentious" as possible, about stating all the relevant info (including it's "fate" of being repealed and/or replaced), and extracting the details that congress.gov etc. doesn't have (readings etc.) for these early laws from the Annals, Journals, etc.

Hopefully, I've correctly guessed what "schema" makes sense, but I'd be thrilled to get more input.

The first Act of Congress is An act to regulate the time and manner of administering certain oaths (Q4750277). Just as explanation, this law was repealed (with all other permanent laws) by §5596 of the Revised Statutes in 1874, and replaced with R.S. §§28-30, and R.S. §§1836-1837. The parts which are still around were codified in 2 USC 21-22 (not positive law) and 4 USC 9-11 (now 4 USC 101-103, and replaced in 1947). I don't think it makes sense to go into the "later history" on this entity, though, if anything that belongs elsewhere.

I know I'm going rather overboard with detail, but I think it's a good idea to actually establish "how" to say this stuff, whether we bother to say it all about some particular law or not. AFAIK the "bot" never was written. Jarnsax (talk) 23:30, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm not using "official title" because these early laws didn't have an official title, "short name" or anything like that, and there was no law about their form or anything yet (the form of the enacting clause became law later) they just had a title at the top. They were just referred to as "Act of DD MMMM, YYYY" in 1 Stat., or "DD MMMM, YYYY, c. X, s. Y, p. ZZ" in the Revised Statutes (which are 18 Stat.)

Looking at how they are cited in the USC notes, "Act of DD MMMM, YYYY, ch. X, Y Stat. Z" seems to be the correct "Uniform Citation Style" i.e. Bluebook or Indigo Book.

For legal citations like "1 Stat. 23 (1789)", per the "style" the parenthetical should be either the year the law was passed, or the year of the edition you are citing...(apparently, the 1874 edition of the R.S. is extremely rare, only half is online, and the LoC only has a reprint of vol. 1) since we are citing the fact of the passage of the law itself, we should use the first option, IMO. The rule is to omit the parenthetical date if the year is in the "name".

I do think it's useful (mainly because they are annoying and never obvious) to actually state how these were cited at various points in time, tho. Jarnsax (talk) 23:44, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Misc. stuff I've learned. The US Stat wasn't actually published until 1845 (other people had published unofficial versions earlier) and Congress legislated the order the laws are listed in.. the "chaptering". The editor talks about it in the introduction, that they aren't sequential in time.. they aren't "in order", so follows and followed by need to be qualifiers on "published in" "US Statutes at Large", with "publication date" of 1845.

On An act to regulate the time and manner of administering certain oaths (Q4750277) (the very first law passed), the "replaced by", "end time", "end cause", "repealed by" statements... the 1874 "Revised Statutes" were enacted into law, and explicitly repealed all permanent laws still in effect on that date (R.S. §5596, 18 Stat. 1085), and replaced them with some part of itself. The 1878 edition included all the amendments up to that date, and was "evidence of" the law, but not actually enacted into law. The 1878 edition was published as 18 Stat, and can be cited that way (it's online). The 1874 edition.... apparently, people threw it away. Even the Library of Congress only has volume 1, and it's printed from a stereotype of a reprint, so... not "the law", lol.

Anyhow, these statements apply to permanent and public laws still in effect on 22 June 1874, with the change of the appropriate section number in "replaced by"... that can be found in the sources I cited for that, the table in the appendix to the R.S. at 18 Stat. 1101, and in Table III of the US Code (at https://uscode.house.gov/table3/table3years.htm). Jarnsax (talk) 22:32, 28 October 2022 (UTC)