Nigeria Election Data Project
Nigeria Election Data Project is a project designed by the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria to document general elections in Nigeria. The project aims at ensuring that elections in Nigeria are documented on Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons. The project would involve data gathering or collation, capacity building, contents creation and data exporting to Wikidata.
Nigeria general elections are conducted every four years in line with the Constitution of Nigeria and thousands of people run for various offices such as Presidential, Senatorial, Governorship, and so on but only a handful of these elections get documented on Wikimedia project. This is a huge contents and knowledge gap that needs to be bridged
This projects aims at documenting the Nigeria election, aspirants, elected officials and to promote the visibility of the general election in Nigeria.
Background[edit]
Nigeria Election Data Portal is a project designed to improve the credibility of Wikipedia and its sisters' project through data-gathering of election results on the one hand and boosting the visibilities of wards, constituencies and polling units in the 36 states of the federation where election will take place. Nigeria is the largest country in Africa, with a 200+ million population. The nation was one of the British colonies that gained independence in 1960. The general election held on 20th September1920 represents its 1st election. Three parties participated in the election won by Nigerian National Democratic Party. Sixty-two years later, eighteen political parties are vying for seats in the election. The Independence National Electoral Commission has cleared 1109 candidates for 109 senatorial offices and 3,122 candidates for the 360 seats in the House of Representatives. Whiles 18 candidates will feature in the presidential election. According to its election timetable, Presidential and National Assembly elections shall hold on Saturday, 25th February 2023, and the Governorship and State Assembly elections shall hold on Saturday, 11th March 2023.
Project goal[edit]
The objective of the Nigeria Election Data Project includes but is not limited to the following:
- Promote the visibility of elections, constituencies, wards and locations in Nigeria
- Bridge the contents gap about Nigerian elections on Wikipedia
- building institutional partnerships with the mission-aligned organization that are interested in the Nigeria election
- bringing more content under free license;
- Strengthening and building capacity for volunteers;
- improve visibility of Nigerian constituencies on the Open Street Map.
Affected projects[edit]
Work plan[edit]
- Request collaboration from election stakeholders in Nigeria.
- Gathering data on the names of the cleared candidates by INEC for the forthcoming election starting from the 23rd of February, 2023.
- Ensure all the listed names above are registered as an item on Wikidata- using OpenRefine.
- Collate all data around cities, locations, and wards in the entire 36 states in Nigeria.
- Ensure the release of photos of all the cleared candidates in (1) above and upload them on commons.
- Organise a nationwide Turn-RED-2-BLUE initiative where participants can add photos to locations/spots existing as RED in WikisootMe and turn them to BLUE colour.
- Organise a series of edit-a-thon to create new profiles for notable cleared candidates in (1) above and improve information on the existing ones.
- Recruit a group of volunteers that will monitor published election results from a reliable source- by INEC and insert it into our central digital portal.
Data collation[edit]
Project impacts[edit]
The project will focus on the following
- Make available under freely-licensed photos of cleared candidates by INEC to improve Wikipedia and its sister projects.
- Organise edit-a-thons to create new profiles where non-existed and improve the existing pages of all cleared candidates for the election.
- Monitoring election results by creditable sources (INEC portal) and publishing them on Wikipedia and sister projects- in real-time.
- Design a central portal for monitoring notable events before and after the election, including published results from creditable sources,].
- Improve visibility of wards and locations where elections will take place using the WikishootMe
Partnership and collaboration[edit]
TBU
Get involved[edit]
wikimedia.org.ng