Wikidata:WikiProject Heads of state and government/What to do when a Head of Government changes

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Wikidata provides several ways of expressing who the Head of Government is for a country:

So, when a Head of Government changes, all of these pages will need updated, or else we end up with inconsistent information:

  • The country
  • The role/office
  • Both people (When there is a new head of government, by implication there is usually an old head of government. So the pages of both individuals must be updated.)

As an example, let's see what would need to be changed if the UK got a new Prime Minister:

Pages to Update

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Country Page

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  1. Go to the page for the country (here United Kingdom (Q145)) and find the entry for head of government (P6).
  2. Add an end time (P582) qualifier for the person who has left office.
  3. Ensure that the rank of this entry is Normal rank. (see Help:Ranking for more information on how or why.)
  4. Add a new entry for the person coming taking office, including a start time (P580) qualifier.
  5. Set the rank of the new person to Preferred rank.

Office Page

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  1. On the country page (United Kingdom (Q145) in this example), ensure that there is a correct value for the office held by head of government (P1313). Then visit the page for the value given in that statement - in this case Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Q14211).
  2. Find the officeholder (P1308) entry.
  3. Add a end time (P582) qualifier for the person leaving.
  4. Ensure that the rank of this entry is Normal rank.
  5. Add a new value for the person starting, including a start time (P580) qualifier.
  6. Set the rank of this new entry to Preferred rank.

Person Pages

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Now we need to edit the Wikidata pages of the two people whose roles are changing, i.e. the outgoing and the incoming Prime Minister.

  1. Visit the page for the outgoing Prime Minister, and find the relevant position held (P39) entry (be careful in the case of someone who held the office on more than one occasion!)
  2. Add a end time (P582) qualifier, as before.
  3. Also add a replaced by (P1366) qualifier to the new Prime Minister
  4. Then go the page for the new Prime Minister
  5. add a new position held (P39) for the position (here, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Q14211)), with the start time (P580), and also link back to the previous holder with replaces (P1365)

A note on sources

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All information added to Wikidata should be verifiable from a credible source. For the data being added here, this will usually mean adding a reference URL (P854) to each statement you add above. Help:Sources can give you much more information about how to do this.

Check your working

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If you have nicely connected all the records from both ends, then no matter what way someone queries the data, they should get a consistent answer.

But as you have been entering details one by one on separate pages, it can be hard to check that you have taken all of the necessary steps. An easy way to check you is to visit the contrast report which compares the three different values to make sure they're the same (please note, you'll need to refresh the report first if you're visiting shortly after updating the data, as it only gets automatically updated about once a day). The columns for ?head, ?officeholder and ?person should all be the same and show the new head of government. If they're not, go back and check carefully that you've followed each of the steps. But assuming they are, wahey! You can now do a little victory dance!

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