Wikidata:Property proposal/United States Public Law
United States Public Law edit
Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Organization
| Description | citation to United States Public Law |
|---|---|
| Represents | United States public law (Q16089878) |
| Data type | External identifier |
| Template parameter | "cite public law" in en:Template:Infobox_U.S._legislation |
| Domain | instances of United States public law (Q16089878) |
| Allowed values | \d+-\d+ |
| Example | Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Q1111004) → 101-336 |
| Formatter URL | http://legislink.org/us/pl-$1 |
- Motivation
"United States Public Law" is one of the main citation methods for acts of the US Congress as originally passed. (Although, unlike Statutes at Large, which covers both Public Laws and Private Laws, this one only covers Public Laws – the vast majority of acts of Congress of interest are public laws anyway, since private laws only apply to specific individuals – e.g. a law which made a specific individual a US citizen would not get a US Public Law citation.) It actually has two fields, congressional session and sequence number of the law; while normally when writing we use e.g. "Pub.L. 104–336" as the format, I think just putting a dash in between is an easier data entry format, and it works well with the formatter URL. It would be nice if there was some way to make Wikidata convert 104-336 to Pub.L. 104–336 at display time, but I'm not aware of how to do that, if that is possible. Also note that the link to legislink.org is not an official US government link, but it is a helpful community service which actually redirects to the official US government link, which has a rather unfriendly URL format. It is already in use by English Wikipedia in the template en:Template:USPL. SJK (talk) 02:09, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
- Addendum: I put the "instances of" as being United States public law (Q16089878), since strictly speaking that is most correct, although actually that class has no instances at the moment and all the instances are of the superclass Act of Congress in the United States (Q476068). Maybe "instances of" should be Act of Congress in the United States (Q476068) instead even though that is not completely accurate (since a US private law would be an instance of Act of Congress in the United States (Q476068) (or more precisely United States private law (Q16089882)) but not United States public law (Q16089878), and would hence be ineligible for this property.) SJK (talk) 04:10, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
- Discussion
Support definitely seems a useful thing to have. ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:23, 9 January 2017 (UTC)- Comment The link in the example redirects to [1]; how is this not official website (P856)? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:29, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
- @Pigsonthewing: The point of the property is not the link. The point of the property is to store the citation for the legislation in something (close to) one of the standard citation formats for US federal legislation. (The actual text format I proposed is slightly different from the standard citation format, but logically equivalent to the standard format–if Wikidata's "formatter URL" was a bit more advanced and could break a string up with a regex and then put different parts (capturing groups) of it in different places in the URL i.e. $1, $2, $3, etc, or similarly if Wikidata had something like a "display format" for an identifier property that could break up a string using a regex and then substitute bits of it into another string to produce the link text, the gap if the formatting would be closer.) The formatter URL is more of just an added bonus. The formatter URL is exploiting the fact that if you know the official legislation citation, it is possible to convert it to a link to the US Government Printing Office (GPO) website. (However, the logic of doing so is too complex for "formatter URL", so an external service is being relied on to do that–if you want to know how the external service does it, they publish their source code) Also, I don't think official website (P856) is right here since Acts of US Congress generally speaking don't have "official websites"; the fact that the GPO chooses to host PDFs containing their official text at a certain URL doesn't make that URL an "official website" ("website" implies multiple pages, this is just a single PDF.) SJK (talk) 20:22, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
- @SJK, ArthurPSmith, Pigsonthewing:
Done ChristianKl (talk) 12:05, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
