Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot/Position holder bot

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Approved--Ymblanter (talk) 19:37, 31 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Position holder bot edit

Position holder bot (talk • contribs • new items • new lexemes • SUL • Block log • User rights log • User rights • xtools)
Operator: Oravrattas (talk • contribs • logs)

Task/s: Produce a tabular display of people who have held a given position

Code:

https://github.com/tmtmtmtm/wmf-position-holder-history (app)
https://github.com/tmtmtmtm/wikidata-position-history (underlying library)

Function details:

This is a replacement for User:Position holder history bot, which is no longer maintained. This works in exactly the same way: adding Listeria-style tables to show a list of people who have held a given position (via position held (P39) statements), and possible problems with those statements (date overlaps, inconsistent successors etc.)

It does not make any edits to items — it simply displays information where requested via a {{PositionHolderHistory|id=Qxxxx}} template call: usually in WikiProject pages or Talk pages.

This new version fixes several bugs with the original; and handles some additional scenarios better (e.g. 'acting' officeholders; successive terms by the same person; dates at year or month precision).

An example of the output can be seen at Talk:Q195965.

NB: I was the primary developer of the original code, but neither I nor Mhl20 (the operator of the previous version) are still with mySociety. --Oravrattas (talk) 06:33, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Support --Haansn08 (talk) 12:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

New section edit

Problems/issues/points of improvement for this bot:

It doesn't seem to use the bot flag granted above, accordingly one can't filter the watchlist
As talk pages don't have a label, it's not clear what item its editing. Adding the [[Qnnnn]] in the summary could solve that.
For complete items, it could be interesting to have some stats in the edit summary too (e.g. "123 persons, complete with incumbent since <date>")
Not sure if daily update frequency is useful, especially as it seems to do updates merely because the formatting changed. Weekly might be sufficient.
Maybe it's better to include the formatting in one or several templates.
Maybe an option to not display lacking P155/P156 could be interesting.
To explain the gap in numbering of officeholders, it would be interesting to display the qualifier "object has role", indicating acting office holders.
To check completeness, we should probably come up with a solution for sede vacante (Q48017) and similar cases where there are expected gaps in office-holders. This could be significant event (P793)=no office holder (Q99435073) with start date and end date qualifiers on the item for the position. These could be appropriately referenced and/or include "has cause".

Hope that helps. --- Jura 17:17, 17 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

New section (Sept 2021) edit

Another problem is that the table generated by the bot lacks a basic feature: a header column. --- Jura 11:41, 6 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]