A CIA website was out of date about who runs the UK | Hacker News Reader

A CIA website was out of date about who runs the UK

opensanctions.org

125 pointspudo45 comments

Very cool, thank you for your efforts!

You mention that it is hard to check whether information is up to date on the CIA website. I see that Wikidata includes both a "start" and "retrieved" timestamp - as many offices are appointed for a set term, do you think it could be helpful to also include an expected end of term date or would that just make it easier to draw the wrong conclusions from outdated data?

Interesting point! I wonder if https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8554 would be a good model for this? Perhaps this is also a bit different between countries - in some, I think the government has to resign while in others the term change is sort of constitutional-automatic...

I would use nature of statement (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P5102) -> expected (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q50376823) as a qualifier. That would make it easier to update in the common case where it does happen by just deleting the qualifier.

I think not, because that would be a promise that the person would hold that office at least until a certain date. In reality, they may resign or pass away at any moment so you cannot make this claim. If there is such a property, "latest possible end date" might be better but that also does not work if an official can be appointed for another term. So really you can only claim some expected date as of this moment and you can question the value of that beyond being a signal that some piece of data is outdated.

This project deserves more credit than it gets. It is vital to have a clear, unbiased view of our leaders, large and small. For investigative journalism but also for the curious citizen. Being sanctioned is no small matter and being able to find the source opens the door to recourse.

I'm happy to see that OpenSanctions choose to become sustainable by allowing companies to get a license to use their data.

> It is vital to have a clear, unbiased view of our leaders, large and small

Having in mind what CIA has done typically with many leaders in the past, there is a non-negligible probability to this project be used for very bad things also, sadly. Turning the project into an extortion list would be the less concerning of them.

I'm not sure about the inclusion of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as separate entities, but listing Governors etc. of dependent territories at the bottom of the UK (Falkland Islands, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands, Virgin Islands, Pitcairn) which, although they are quite small places, are more independent than Scotland and Wales.

I wonder if it would be worth separating US states rather than putting all the US state governors inside the USA. They all have many other state-level positions, it would be good to list those in an organised way.

I'm only looking at the https://peppercat.org/ site - I haven't checked the underlying data structure in WikiData, but maybe a fully hierarchical structure is needed. That would also enable adding data about e.g. members of parliament / congress, and to city and council levels by drilling down.

> but listing Governors etc. of dependent territories at the bottom of the UK (Falkland Islands, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands, Virgin Islands, Pitcairn) which, although they are quite small places, are more independent than Scotland and Wales.

This is largely an artefact of the UK's weird internal governance structure, which seems determined to leave everything as sui generis rather than have some kind of system. In the US or German or Swiss system the answer to "is this a state or federal power?" rarely depends on which state is asking.

(Yes the US has its non-states as well, DC and PR, which should probably also get regularized)

What criteria would you apply for independence? The ratio of the locally decided budget over overall government spending in the region?

I would restrict the top list to UN member states + a few places that aren't covered by the UN. Scotland and Wales are covered by the UN via the UK, so they shouldn't be listed. Ideally I would have them as separate pages within the UK.

Taiwan?

"For the UK, the data is definitely over a year out of date, but also manages to entirely leave out some interesting positions, like the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary"

UK reader here. That's interesting ... it's the CIA though: maybe they know something we don't!

Yes my guess was that they had left Rupert Murdoch in, and left out the buffoon who currently has the keys to number ten.

Given this weeks reporting I can see how people would be confused.

One could make the argument that omitting the Prime Minister from the list of leaders is actually correct.

Not really. The 'leader' of the Netherlands for all political purposes is the Prime Minister, not the king.

You are mixing up leader with head of state. The latter can be a completely meaningless role fulfilled by a paid actor such as in our case, whereas the nominal leader may look like a paid actor, but tends to have actual power and some form of accountability.

I think it was a political remark on Boris Johnson.

Valid for Ukraine too

> leader with head of state

I am not a native speaker - what is the difference between these two words?

In e.g. a monarchy, the head of state is the king or queen. In many monarchies these days, this person tends to have very little actual power.

The leader of a country is the person leading it, e.g. a president, prime minister, or similar.

Sometimes the term head of government is also used, which I think is usually the same as the leader of the country.

In parliamentary republics, the president is the head of state (and has little actual power), while the prime minister is the head of government.

One usually has a prime minister as the head of cabinet and the executive branch via the rest of the ministers. What argument could one make to say a prime minister is not a leader, since the actual argument is missing from your comment?

He is making a joke about how Rupert Murdoch actually runs the UK.

> What argument could one make to say a prime minister is not a leader, since the actual argument is missing from your comment?

Hiding in fridges for a start.

I'm fairly sure the post you're responding to is an observation on the current state of UK politics, rather than a generalisation.

There's a Wikidata WikiProject all about modelling politicians[0] if you want to dive straight in to the Wikidata side of things.

[0] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_every_pol...

For what is worth, Italy cabinet is also lagging behind https://www.cia.gov/resources/government/italy/ this page still doesn't reflecting Mario Draghi taking office.

> Unfortunately Wikidata's single-item-based view, coupled with inconsistent modelling across different countries, makes it really difficult to see what's missing or incorrect...

Wikidata modelling is a complete disaster: basically nothing has a solid, documented and maintained model, and no one appears to be working on it very much compared to the amount of poorly-modelled data being poured in.

I'm surprised anyone gets anything of use out of Wikidata. Which is an enormous pity, because it's got incredible potential. But that's what I thought 10 years ago, and it's not really got much better, except now there's so much data it times out more often then not unless you are lucky with your query optimization.

For Spain it's not only outdated but they also changed the gender of one minister, "Manuela CASTELLS Olivan".

This is the sort of thing that really newspapers should take on collaboratively, since they would all benefit from it every day.

Sadly, it's a field where egoism rules. Not the only one for sure, but you'd expect better from the class that we, as a society, basically authorize to preach us every day about the values of our time.

I’ve been positively surprised by how leading newspapers have been, notably in open-sourcing their software. It’s far from perfect but some teams internally see the value of what they do, and a handful of managers get that by commoditising certain aspects, like software or hopefully basic facts, they can highlight their unique contribution.

To be fair, Boris Johnson isn’t really Prime Minister, he just plays one on TV.

ha ha, yeah, records might need updating in the not-too-distant future :)

I'd love to know who's trying to oust him with all these leaks about lockdown parties at Number 10, it's been an absolutely masterful bit of politicking. They wait just long enough for Johnson to commit to the lie, then drop another leak that discredits his previous defence. My current theories are:

* Michael Gove: he's always had leadership ambitions and is good mates with Malcolm Tucker-esque figure Dominic Cummings who's well known for his ability with this kind of shit-stirring from his experience with Vote Leave and the 2019 Tory election campaign. Gove has backstabbed Johnson before (he sabotaged Johnson's leadership bid at a previous election) and while he's nominally a Johnson loyalist I'd definitely bet he's got the guts and the motivation for an 'et tu, Gove' movement.

* Dominic Cummings: he's definitely got an axe to grind against Johnson after he (allegedly) got forced out of the tent by Johnson's wife Carrie Johnson who's apparently exercising a lot of influence at Number 10. This might be purely a spite move! He's an interesting character, he's never really been a Conservative ideologically and is clearly an intelligent political operator with his own agenda revolving around breaking up the 'blob' of bureaucratic inertia in the Civil Service in favour of a more data-driven culture associated with the tech world. I still don't really know what to make of him if I'm honest and he's been around for years now.

* The Coronavirus Recovery Group, a faction of Tory backbenchers opposed to lockdowns and other COVID restrictions. Someone was definitely trying to sabotage Matt Hancock last year in a similar fashion, and someone on the inside had to be leaking the CCTV footage of his hypocrisy (for those unware, he was the Health Secretary during the first stage of the pandemic and very hawkish on lockdowns until he got caught breaking his own mandates to get off with a member of his staff - both were married). The Tory backbench is on the whole increasingly anti-restrictions and this could be a way of achieving this policy - these revelations of an entrenched culture of hypocrisy and 'one rule for the little people, another for the elites' have certainly destroyed the credibility restrictions had with the public indeed they're being rapidly phased out for the most part.

It also lost tracks of who runs Italy, it still reports the Giuseppe Conte government but it is almost an year he has been replaced by Mario Draghi's one.

Germany as well. Merkel is still running the country according to the CIA.

What about versioning/historical data? Would be interesting as well and with daily checks this should be possible in a fine grained way

Wikidata has qualifiers and ranks which can be added to statements that can be used for this.

As an example, Barbados:

(statement) head of state (P35): Queen Elizabeth II (Q9682)

(qualifier) start time (P580): 30 November 1966

(qualifier) end time (P582): 29 November 2021

(statement) head of state (P35): Sandra Mason (Q9333540)

(qualifier) start time (P582): 30 November 2021

the second statement then has the "preferred" rank (the first has a "normal" rank, and there is also a "deprecated" rank for inaccurate information)

See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q244#P35 for a better visualisation than HN's comment allows

Given the revolving door that is UK cabinet positions over the past 5 or so years, I don't blame them.

Pure chaos.

awesome project.

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