Wikidata:WikiProject Government/Report/Singapore

Starting the project

As a group, we already had countries of interest in mind, but before deciding on one, we had a quick look into the current Govdirectory projects. Japan and Singapore were not represented yet, so we did not hesitate to start working on one of them. Both are fantastic countries, but we chose Singapore due to a few reasons:

1. The Singaporean official government website is modern and well structured.
2. The government website offers a page listing all trusted sites, which seemed convenient (and it truly was helpful).
3. All important websites are written in the English language.
4. The government has an active social media presence on multiple popular platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram.

Approach

Our approach was straightforward. Our overall goal was to fill in enough information so that Singapore gets approved for deployment. The following are the planned steps:

1. Research
2. Singapore, Parliament, Government & Supreme Court
3. Ministries (& Query)
4. Community Development Council Districts (& Query)
5. Town Councils (& Query)
6. Constituencies (& Query)
7. Fill Govdirectory WikiData Singapore Page
8. Deployment

Before starting any project, one needs to obtain the needed knowledge. Therefore, we read through the main Govdirectory page and skimmed through official Singaporean government-related websites. As we gained an overview of the constitution, we gathered a rough list of the items that need to be created or completed. After grouping and sorting the items, we then decided to use a kanban board in Trello to manage ourselves as a group.

Tasks and checklists have been created. We were working in sprints. In two weekly meetings, we set weekly goals, tasks to keep track of, a unified approach to items, and discussed problems and successes. Besides the task management, it was also important to us, to thoroughly understand the Singaporean constitution to the best of our ability, so we sketched the structure on a whiteboard in Miro (Link to the board (Can read and comment)) which helped us visualize all the entities.

Overview of the constitution of Singapore (WIP)

Generally, we wanted to make sure, that all relevant entities are mirrored and presented as WikiData item so that the number of results when querying is correct. The following properties were always checked and added when missing: instance of, country and located in the administrative territorial entity. Furthermore, we added general information such as: location, coordinate location, street address, contains the administrative territorial entity , official website, email adress , phone number and more.

Before truly starting on a topic, we wrote the query first, to fetch all current WikiData items. We took inspiration from other Govdirectory countries and wrote the queries in a similar structure. With the help of the gained knowledge about SPARQL from the last exercises, we were able to go through this process quickly. The properties we were using are mostly the following: instance of and country in combination with dissolved, abolished or demolished date.

We did not follow the plan strictly as each of us encountered multiple challenges along the way (described in the "Problems and questions to discuss" section). Once determined, we would notify the whole group of the problem via chat and then discuss it in our weekly meetings. In case we would not get any further, we would ask our professor for guidance. Since the contributors of the Govdirectory project know about and experienced similar problems, as advised by our professor, we also started a discussion on the main discussion page.

As the final touches were soon to be made, we set to work on the actual Govdirectory WikiData page of Singapore and prepared it for deployment.

Gathering information

The following are our main sources (mainly our starting point):

• https://www.gov.sg/trusted-sites
• https://www.sgdi.gov.sg/ministries
• https://www.mnd.gov.sg/our-work/regulating-town-councils/about-town-councils
• https://www.cdc.gov.sg/about-cdc/information-on-the-five-districts
• https://www.eld.gov.sg/elections_type_electoral.html
• https://www.parliament.gov.sg/mps/find-mps-in-my-constituency
• https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=studentpub

A lot more web pages have been used as e.g. every town council or ministry has its own homepage. When adding new statements, we made sure to add the source as well as the date it is been retrieved.

Problems and questions to discuss

When working on the ministries we ran into a semantic problem regarding divisions, statuary boards and partner agencies. Technically these do not fall under the category subsidiary, but we could not find a more fitting attribute for them. To get a few more brains to help us out with our dilemma we decided to post a question to the discussion page.
 In this question we mentioned considering to propose a new property. Two other WikiData users recommended against doing so unless all other solutions fail, due to it being a very tedious process. One of those users mentioned the option of using „part of“ as a more generic solution for our problem. This ended up being our final solution, because it was the most straightforward and logical to us. Due to time constraints we were not able to do do this for all ministries yet. Nonetheless the problem could come up again when working on government data and a new attribute is definitely a valid option.

Another problem appeared during our work on the town councils. Each town council had up to six individual offices with different street addresses, opening hours, phone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses for each of them. We did not want to gather all the different contact data into the town council of the offices, because it would be very confusing for the next person trying to look up or work on it, so we ended up creating a new item for each office and adding all its individual information to it. If a town council actually shared the same contact data between all of its offices we just added said contact data to the town council itself.

Queries

Ministries

• Query for all Ministries of Singapore (should be 16)

Town Councils

• Query for all Town Councils of Singapore (should be 17)

Community Development Council Districts

Agencies at this level are Community Development Council Districts and use

⟨ Community Development Council District ⟩ instance of (P31) ⟨ Community Development Council (Q4426538)    ⟩

which make them easy to identify and query for.

• Query for all Community Development Council Districts (should be 5)

Constituencies

• Query for Constituencies of Singapore (should be 31)
• Query for Single Member Constituencies of Singapore (should be 14)
• Query for Group Representation Constituencies of Singapore (should be 17)

Added & Updated Entries

We started with Singapore itself:

1. Added the five Community Development Councils of Singapore under the attribute "contains administrative territorial entity"
2. Added the Supreme Court of Singapore as the highest judicial authority

Next we looked at the Legislature, the Executive & the Judiciary:

1. Parliament of Singapore: added email address, social network websites, phone and fax numbers, current head of state
2. Government of Singapore: added the Prime Minister's Office as a subsidiary
3. Supreme Court of Singapore: added Singapore as "applies to jurisdiction"

Ministries (16)

1. Added official website, phone number, fax number, street address, open days
2. Connected some of the Ministries to the related divisions, statuary boards and partner agencies by putting the Ministry itself for the attribute "part of"

Town Councils (17)

1. Created most Town Councils
2. Added country, "located in the administrative territorial entity" and official websites to Town Councils
3. Created offices for each Town Council
4. Added country, open days, street address, phone number, fax number to offices

Community Development Centers (5)

1. Added street address, email address, open days, phone number, "contains the administrative territorial entity"

Constituencies (31)

1. Added "constituency of the Parliament of Singapore" under "instance of" for the few ones that did not have it yet.
2. Added the property dissolved, abolished or demolished date for the according historic constituencies

Retrospective

In retrospect it would have been really nice, if we looked more into tools for editing sooner. When doing some tedious work like creating and editing offices for each town council it would have saved us some energy and time.

With this project, we really tried to dive deep into the topic and not just scratch the surface. We spend a lot of time researching to be able to model the data correctly. At some point it was so difficult to understand the governmental structure that we almost sent an e-mail to the Ministry of Education (Q4294530) of Singapore. Just before we wanted to press send we found a PDF created from Singaporian students who explained the governmental structure of Singapore which was really helpful. Yay!

At the end of this project we wanted to add Singapore to the Govdirectory website. Therefore, we created a Pull Request. Ainali reviewed our PR and had a question regarding the constituencies. He wanted to know if they are organizations or just electoral divisions. From our understanding they are just electoral divisions. He explained to us that on the Govdirectory website they only focus on organizations, thus only the head of each will be mentioned and displayed. Therefore the constituencies of Singapore would appear empty on the website, because they are not compliant with the rules (which is a shame) as Group Representation Constituences don't have a head of the organisation. Resulting from the discussion, Ainali removed the constituencies and merged our Pull Request. You can find the whole discussion here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Govdirectory/Singapore

Thanks to our great teamwork and time management every hard task was manageable. Through our two weekly meetings we were able to overcome struggles and uncertainties and help and support each other.

Highlights

Contributing to WikiData was, despite the tedious work, really fun. In the following we want to share some highlights of our journey with WikiData:

1. There are bots that correct mistakes made by editors, such as submitting a property value in an incorrect format. After adding the email address for certain entities, we received a warning that we should add the https prefix. The bot KrBot changed the prefix to mailto. We were a little bit confused so we took a closer look at the property email address. There it was also stated to use the mailto prefix. This makes sense of course. When clicking on the email address the email app opens, which is very convenient. But we still do not know why the warning said that we should use the https prefix.
2. The main discussion page was convenient as we were struggling with choosing an appropriate property. At first it felt a little intimidating to post a question in a public forum, but afterwards we were really happy, because we received some great answers. The question we asked was not easy to answer, but having people want to help us and give us advice made us feel less alone with our problem.
3. It is cool that WikiData has oversighters. When publishing an edit while not being logged in, the IP address is displayed and visible to anyone. When this happens to you, you can contact Oversight and they will delete your IP address.
4. Our biggest highlight of this journey was that one of the WikiData contributors themself Ainali checked our queries on our Govdirectory Singapore page. This gave us confidence and reassurance.

Improvements

While working with WikiData, we also noticed some things that can be improved. The following improvement suggestions can also be found on the improvement page.

1. As already mentioned, if you are not logged in and you publish an edit, your IP address will be displayed. It would be nice if editors got a warning if they are not logged in when submitting an edit. If it happens anyway, it would also be nice if editors could get information on what they can do to get their IP address removed, for example contacting Oversight.
2. If you edit a statement a short time after midnight and insert the “new” date (CET) as a reference to the retrieved property, you get an error saying that the date cannot be in the future. This seems to happen because WikiData uses UCT/GMT.
3. It is too easy to accidentally create duplicates of items. There could be a warning when creating an item that has a nearly identical name as an already existing one. That could save editors a good chunk of time.

Conclusion

Through this project we entered the world of WikiData. We would have never thought that we would ever contribute to a project which is publicly accessible for everyone. (How scary…) But in the end we are really proud that we did. We learned a lot about WikiData, as well as Singapore. This was the first time we looked very thoroughly at the governmental structure and agencies of a country other than Germany. Usually, when traveling for example, we are more interested in the landscape or pretty architecture and good cafes to visit. With this project we got to know a country (Singapore) on a whole different level.

Trying to complete the governmental agencies of Singapore in WikiData was exhausting sometimes, but also fun in general. We were surprised that some governmental entities of Singapore were already created in WikiData. For us it was clear that we cannot model all Singaporian governmental agencies in the given time. But we wanted to do as much as possible and do it as accurately as possible. Each completed task was a big accomplishment for us. We hope that with our contribution we have helped to complete the governmental agencies of Singapore a bit more.

We are very happy that we supported an open-source project and can imagine doing similar activities again in the future.

Thank you WiseWoman for introducing us to WikiData!