Tony Bowden

Every week I track changes of political officeholders worldwide. Turns out a lot of those changes have interesting stories behind them, that often don't make international news, so I've been persuaded to turn the list into a newsletter. Week one is at shuffled.beehiiv.com/p/shuffled-202…

I wish I could say this week's Shuffled has *no* US content, but there's some spillover to elsewhere. ---- Missed all the recent political shenanigans in Bulgaria, Samoa, Croatia, Kenya, and Poland? This week's Shuffled update covers these and many more: shuffled.beehiiv.com/p/shuffled-202…

Today: 🇸🇩: military makes rapid gains in Khartoum 🇨🇩: M23 rebels threaten to take Goma 🇨🇴: heaviest fighting between ELN & FARC guerrillas in years 🇷🇸: mass protests and general strike across the country 🇺🇦🇷🇺: major drone strikes Media: 24-hour coverage of the Trump circus.

Another week, another slew of shufflings, including more than one Prime Minister lasting less than a week in office: shuffled.beehiiv.com/p/shuffled-202…

🎉 Just blogged about my work integrating @Wikidata with @internetarchive's @openlibrary! Excited to share how we're enhancing author pages and enhancing search. Check it out! 📚 blog.rayberger.org/wikidata-and-t… #OpenLibrary #Wikidata #OpenSource

@Tagishsimon It also doesn't help that the vast majority of wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:… are far too simplistic, almost entirely avoiding complex dates (precision, P1326/P12506/…), deprecation, noval/unknown, !Q5, multiple routes to the same data, etc etc that are needed for most real world use

@Tagishsimon Yeah, there are a great many ways in which WD is increasingly write-only, and I fear this is one of them. (And not helped by some of the more interesting ways in which people choose to cram multiple incompatible qualifiers onto a single P39 and then undo any attempts to fix them)

Wikidata represents that ~450k dead people are current holders of positions (like MP, mayor of this, CEO of that, or whatever). That's probably not good. For instance, says there are ~3,000 people sitting in the UK House of Lords right now. * w.wiki/AdQE

@generalising @Tagishsimon I think this is one where it's going to be best to work backwards: starting with a list of questions, and seeing which ones can't be answered yet, and which ones are way too complicated atm, but could be improved by a different data model.

@tmtm @Tagishsimon I am wondering if the most robust way to do this would be some kind of "status" qualifier on the specific P39 claims - "cabinet post" / "attending cabinet" / etc. Be a hassle to get the data in though.

So obviously I'll do this before bed. In the traditional way. Go on Wikipedia for UK Cabinet, click through to each profile, etc.... BUT twitter.com/FHublet/status…

@generalising @Tagishsimon Some of those should be fairly straightforward with what's currently there atm, but others (e.g. "Who were the Home Office Ministers during <period>?") will likely require multiple levels of data clean-up first.

@generalising @Tagishsimon A good start might be to document the various queries required to produce various subsets of the current official list on gov.uk/government/min… as well as at least near-past historic versions of that, e.g. web.archive.org/web/2014012210…

@PlasticPlanners youtube.com/watch?v=c0p3Xk… ?

Hmm - somehow this afternoon's chat has involved a game of #tubesongs To be clear, you get a point for Waterloo or Baker Street Somebody has just played Gospel Oak. You get 1,000 for that. Anyone got a more obscure one - probably a Fall or Half Biscuit song?

@colleenm_hughes @darachos Ashes to Ashes is Bowie's own sequel to it.

@darachos Different artist, but Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home) is a sequel of sorts to David Bowie's Space Oddity.

@niamh_d I've seen a few recommendations for kennys.ie as a replacement. Haven't tried it yet, so can't really compare, but flat rate €1 per book for shipping isn't bad.