Where Do Mayors Come From?
Nikolai Janakiev, 2018In this proof of concept project, we explore the diversity of culture in the European Union (EU) and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) by looking at where current mayors are born. To collect this kind of data set would have been a very difficult research project only a few years ago and we would have had to manually search for each current mayor in each city in different languages. We solve this problem by using Wikidata which provides a machine-readable open knowledge base which is collaboratively maintained. We provide an interactive visualization of the collected data which can be explored in the browser. There are visible holes in the data visualization, but since Wikidata is a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap it is growing over time and improving with every contribution.
