Starting the project

Our project task is to add information to the govdirectory Wikidata project for a specific country. First of all, we read up on the government project and, during our initial research, we noticed that Luxembourg was not on the list of existing countries. This was our motivation to add this rather small country to the project and thus complete and improve the data. We were confirmed in our plan when we found out that there is already an extensive Wikidata entry and a good official government webpage about Luxembourg. To get a better idea of the project intention and a good structured report we read through the reports of the past groups of the Semantic Modeling course. In addition to that, we read through some other countries on govdirectory, especially Sweden because they provide a lot of information and a four star rank.

In order to create a basis, we then generally researched what constitutes a "government" to determine what related data we have to add in Wikidata. After that we dealt with the political system of Luxembourg to get an overview about the most important agencies.

Approach

First of all we had to add Luxembourg to the govdirectory project. Therefore we watched the video on the govdirectory that made it very easy to get a good starting point in the project. Because the Wikidata page of Luxembourg provide a lot of information about the first level administrative units, they were automatically added by the template. After we defined a government, we then started to find the required information for Luxembourg and add it to Wikidata.

govdirectory structure

Because Wikidata already contains a lot of information about the state agencies of Luxembourg we wanted to validate the information and check if they have added credible references for the agency data. Therefore we went through the administrative agencies in the header of the auto-generated govdirectory template of Luxembourg. The Wikidata page of Luxembourg is semi-protected, so we started by checking the entries according to the Chamber of Deputies. Like this we went straight forward through all pages down to the first level administrative units communes and cantons. Our proceed was to check the correctness of the data using the information from the official government webpages. In addition we compared with similar agencies from other countries to proof the completeness of our information set. Going through the entries we noticed that there were missing a lot of references. So it was our concern to add these proofs of data. Furthermore it was our goal to fix small inconsistencies like unified upper and lowercase letters in labels, non-existent descriptions and aliases.

When we came to the ministries of Luxembourg it was really helpful that the official webpage of Luxembourg gouvernement.lu provides the title of each ministry in english, german and french. This made it much easier for us to complement the labels and description in all these three languages even if our french is not the best. For each ministry we added or replaced the correct ministers that are listed on the webpage.

header of the official government page

On gouvernement.lu we found that they listed all departments. Each department belongs to a ministry. The departments did not exist in Wikidata, so we added them by using Quick Statements. After adding one item successfully with this tool we created statements to create all remaining departments by using Visual Studio Code and executed them all together.

Thus we have worked our way down to the cantons and communes. For checking the completeness of the data we build queries to get all communes belonging to one canton. Based on the queries we found out that for some communes the linkings were missing. To link the missing communes we used: https://www.citypopulation.de/en/luxembourg/. We also found out that some communes were incorrectly linked. Meaning there were some towns wrongly labelled as an instance of a commune. So we fixed this incorrect data. And just like on the other pages we removed outdated data as well.

In the end we created our pull request for the govdirectory project, so that Luxembourg will be added to the official page.

Gathering information

This was our main source of information. There we got the information about ministries and departments on state level.

government.lu

To get a nice overview about the topic this page was a good starting point.

luxembourg.public.lu

This page is more for citizens / companies of Luxembourg to get information about specific topics.

guichet.public.lu

Problems and questions to discuss

One of the first problems we encountered while checking the data of the pages automatically linked from our project page was that the Wikidata page of Luxembourg is semi protected. So we first of all had to deal with the different user rights in Wikidata and found out that these pages are only allowed to be edited by users with more than 50 contributions. Therefore we start editing the non-protected items.

When we wanted to add the reference to the subsidiaries in the government of Luxembourg we encountered the problem that there is no option to add one reference for all values in one statement. So we had to insert the reference 24 times and had to wait because of the spam protection. We experienced this as not very user friendly since it interrupts us in the workflow.

Another issue we dealt with, was the wording of the highest court of Luxembourg. Per default the englisch label was superior court, but on the official Luxembourg page it was named supreme court. Since our political knowledge is not good enough to know the possible difference, we have followed the official site here. If the supreme and superior courts have the same meaning, it’s problematic that they both exist in Wikidata with different descriptions so we used one entry, renamed the label to supreme court and add superior court as an alias for supreme court. We think they have the same meaning because they only name supreme court on their official website https://gouvernement.lu/en/systeme-politique/cours-tribunaux.html.

While going through the ministries we had some issues checking and adding the correct location for the ministries, because there were some inconsistencies between the entries in Wikidata and the coordinates/addresses given from the official websites. So we put the correct addresses in wikidata and added a reference for the location information. Also, we have noticed an inconsistency on the official website regarding the ministers of the ministry of state. On this website (https://me.gouvernement.lu/en.html) two ministers are indicated, whereas on this site (https://gouvernement.lu/en/gouvernement.html) the second one, Marc Hansen, is not listed as a minister of the ministry of state. As a solution we picked the first source and added a reference to wikidata. As we added a new significant person of the ministry of finance we ran into the issue that the minister of finances item was created twice without an english description. So we change this element to make it more easy to use the correct item. Another problem that appeared during our editings regarding the naming convention uniform for the ministries was that the names of the references have not updated immediately inside of the government of luxembourg page. It was really confusing not to see if all the ministries were changed correctly and thus again something that interrupted our workflow. While we added the departments we noticed that the ministry a department belongs to was not always given. By the description it would be possible to guess the responsible ministry but we couldn’t provide a reference for that, so we didn’t linked these at all.

Another finding related to the disbanding of the districts. The first level administration units on the government page still lists the districts but we found out that these were removed on 3. Oktober 2015. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a way to remove the districts from that list. Deleting the districts from wikidata could be a solution, but for the historical timeline it could be interesting to see that the districts existed until that point. A better solution would be if the parser of the first level administrative units could react to the dissolved, abolished or demolished date and skip these items for the listing.

While we searched for information about the cantons of Luxembourg we ran into some troubles. First we couldn't find official websites for the cantons. During the research for official websites we came over this article on an official government page: https://luxembourg.public.lu/en/society-and-culture/territoire-et-climat/territoire.html . There it is mentioned that the cantons do not have an administrative structure. Instead they are just used for elections and to define several districts. So we were not sure if they are a first level administration agency.

In general it was hard at some points since we both are no political experts. Hence we struggled sometimes to understand the political structures and meanings. However, here we were lucky that we had good structured and well explained sources for all the information.

Sense of achievement

Besides some problems we also had some achievements. Gathering information about Luxembourg on state agency level was very easy as we found the gouvernement.lu webpage. In addition the straight forward work while adding the information for the ministry was a bit repetitive but also very easy to do.

Furthermore writing the Quick Statements was a really funny task for us. First we had to figure out how they are working but when we understood the syntax behind Quick Statements it was really straight forward to add information with this tool.

First of all the queries were a bit confusing for us, but then we read through some examples and understood the syntax and how to get the information we wanted to query. After this comprehensions phase writing the queries was really straight forward except for queries where we wanted to get all communes without those which were merged and does not exists anymore. Determining how to exclude results by an subproperty needed some research time, but then we ran through the examples and found one that uses exactly these qualifiers. In the end writing the queries was really fun and it was one of our favorite tasks during the project.

Queries

After adding information to Wikidata we build following queries that might possibly answer some questions about the structure of the administrative units of Luxembourg.

Query state level ministry data

Overview

Query all ministries

# all ministries of Luxembourg
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q30744477.
  MINUS { ?item wdt:P576 [] }
  MINUS { ?item wdt:P1366 [] }
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Query all state level departments

# all state level departments of Luxembourg
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q113127956.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Query current ministers of a ministry

Query all current Ministers of the Ministry of State Ministry of State

# get the current current Ministers of the Ministry of State
SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  wd:Q30285476 wdt:P3342 ?item
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Query departments for a ministry

Query all Department that belongs to the Ministry of State

# all departments that belongs to Ministry of State
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q113127956.
  ?item wdt:P361 wd:Q30285476
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Query Cantons and Communes

Overview

Query all cantons and districts of Luxembourg

# all Cantons and Districts of Luxembourg
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  VALUES ?district {wd:Q216888 wd:Q1146429}
  ?item wdt:P31 ?district.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Query all communes without merged communes (some communes were merged with other communes so they do not longer exists)

# all communes without merged communes
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?itemDescription WHERE {
    ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q2919801.
    MINUS {
    ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q2919801;
      p:P31 [
        pq:P582 ?end
      ].
    }
    MINUS { ?item wdt:P576 [] }
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Query all communes of a canton

Query all communes of Canton of Capellen

# all Communes of Canton of Capellen
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q2919801.
  ?item wdt:P131 wd:Q397678
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Query Surpreme Court data

Query Präsident of Supreme Court

# get the current president of the Supreme court in Luxembourg
SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  wd:Q112818966 wdt:P1308 ?item
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
} ORDER BY ?itemLabel

Try it!

Added & Updated Entries

Updated

To summarize what we updated: We added missing references in the items listed below as well as the english and french labels and descriptions. Further we updated important positions, headquarter and location information. For some items we also added social media and official website information. In addition, we have eliminated inconsistencies in the labels such as upper and lower case.

Legislature, Executive and highest judicial authority

Ministries

Sometimes the ministers were wrong so we replaced them by the correct ministers. Unfortunately, we could not find any data on the inaugurations of the ministers, so we could not provide information about that.

Added

Looking through the official website of the government (https://gouvernement.lu/en/), we noticed that individual departments are divided under the ministries. So we decided to go through them and set the ministry as a parent element. Therefore we had to create all the departments (https://gouvernement.lu/en/administrations.html) in Wikidata.

Departments

To add the departments in the shortest possible time, we used the quick statements tool to add all the departments and link them directly to the relevant ministry.

Conclusion & Retrospective

As an conclusion it was really interesting to take a look at the political system of Luxembourg. We learned a lot about the country and the administrative structures. It was really interesting to see how a country, that is much smaller than germany, is structured. In addition we found it interesting to gain some knowledge about Wikidata and how to contribute information to the internet. But we also learned that we need to provide references to the information we found on the internet, because otherwise you do not know where that information comes from. So we always need a way to verify the information by providing a link to another website.

For us personally we think it is helpful to use Wikidata and SparQL to query information and use these for example in a web application. All in all it was really fun to learn something about Wikidata, Luxembourg and how to organize information semantically.

Wikidata:WikiProject Government/Report/Luxembourg

Contents

Starting the project

Approach

Gathering information

Problems and questions to discuss

Sense of achievement

Queries

Query state level ministry data

Overview

Query current ministers of a ministry

Query departments for a ministry

Query Cantons and Communes

Overview

Query all communes of a canton

Query Surpreme Court data

Added & Updated Entries

Updated

Legislature, Executive and highest judicial authority

Ministries

Added

Departments

Conclusion & Retrospective