A “parliament diagram” is a data visualization which communicates the composition of a parliament including details such as the party affiliation of members and the relative power of coalitions. David Richfield, user:Slashme, is the champion of this visualization, its primary developer, and an enthusiastic thinker on the concept and its applications. I talked with him on Wednesday 14 August 2019 at Wikimania.
The Parliament Diagram Tool is a Wikipedia application available since 2014. It is significant because before the existence of this tool and communication format, there was no standard way of presenting government composition in a diagram which viewers would intuitively and quickly understand. Since this diagram is so easy to understand, and because the tool is easy to use, and because so many people globally seek governmental information on Wikipedia, these diagrams have quickly become popular and universally accepted among an audience of hundreds of millions of Wikipedia readers. If Wikipedia persists, it seems possible that civics education in every culture and language could incorporate this diagram as the universal standard for explaining government. This diagram replaces previous technology such as explaining government composition with prose, or showing membership as a table of numbers, or trying to adapt other general data visualizations like pie charts. I asked David to tell me the story of the diagram and the tool he uses to develop it.
He started by saying that all output from the tool goes into Commons:Category:Election parliament diagrams but not all images are from this tool. I later checked, and the category is actually Election apportionment diagrams. Wikipedia delights me because so frequently here the global mastermind of a new paradigm of thought is so excited to edit and create content that they will not even bother with self promotion enough to know the name of their own project. The name hardly matters so long as people understand what it communicates, but if we were more corporate then we would have branding and a product roll out plan. Since anyone can edit, any one individual like David can get hundreds of millions of pageviews guiding public thought in government and be very casual about the directing this massive attention.
Example art is in the Wikipedia article for list of legislatures by number of members.
History of development
Development is in GitHub at slashme/parliamentdiagram. Slashme is a participant in the Wikimedia Commons Graphic Lab, which is well known in the wiki community as the hub of community discussion on best practices in image development. Many people liked this style of diagram and there was a java-based tool which generated these diagrams, but it had some problems including only publishing as a png. Users at the Graphics Lab were complaining that they wanted a consistent style for Parliament Diagrams.
User:Habbit coded a tool to make some. This person’s user page says, “I created ADSVote out of the blue to draw the cool graphs I saw on the papers.” Slashme did not copy the code but did take inspiration from this and similarly described their comparable more developed tool on their own English Wikipedia userpage.
Slashme started coding the tool on 6 August, 2014. This project mostly gets developed once a year at the Hackathon. In London Slashme made it possible to users to fill in boxes labeled as “party”, “delegates”, etc. In 2015 it became possible to produce Westminster Style diagrams. In 2016 Esino Lario OAuth became a feature to directly import the file to Commons. Also in that year the addition was to automatically add a legend to the commons description. In the first instance of the tool the user had to type a string which said which party got the vote but now this is automatic.
The design of the arch-style diagram came from Habbit. Habbit has not been active on Wikipedia for some years, so if Habbit got the idea from elsewhere, that original source was not globally known as a standard online. The Wikimedia community suggested the design of the Westminster Diagram and Slashme designed it.
Maybe 10-20 people commented on the design of these diagrams including for example user:Shabidoo on Slashme’s talk page.
Challenges for 2019
A problem from a few months ago is too many people doing tests with the tool. Since then the tool has made restriction that uploads to commons have to be for a real parliament or a notable fictional one.
The tool has an unexpected community of reuse in the video game NationStates. In this game players create fictional countries and need to showcase a fictional parliament, and for this purpose they create parliament diagrams.
New for this year – the hope is to allow someone to manually copy/paste the template text from the Commons description into a text box in the tool, and in return get a filled out, updated diagram by only changing the parts of the composition which have changed.
In the longer term, Slashme wishes to get information from Wikidata to pre-populate lists of parties for the users. Currently Wikidata does not routinely have data on the membership of various parliaments. If Wikidata had this information then developing the tool would be easier, and if the tool existed then more people would contribute this information to Wikidata.
In the 30 days prior to the Hackathon 14 August 2019, 55 different users have uploaded 143 different diagrams to commons through the tool. The original number of uploads was 173, but users came back to fix their files. 14 of those were test uploads.
If anyone wants to examine the source of an svg file then ctrl u is the common shortcut.
Slashme is a former board member of Wikimedia South Africa. He has been on the Wikimania Scholarship review committee since 2013. He registered his Wikipedia account on 23 September 2005.