What is this?

Lists of government ministers, and other key political leaders, from all over the world.

Why?

This sort of data is really important and useful in lots of scenarios, but is often surprisingly difficult to find. Until recently the default place to look was the CIA World Leaders list but that no longer exists. There are some other places that collate and publish similar data, but that often comes with a significant delay, and is almost always just plain lists of names.

How often is the data updated?

Pretty much every day. I can't promise that everything is always completely up-to-date everywhere, but if something is out of date for more than a few days, it's likely that I've missed an announcement somewhere, so please do let me know.

Where do you get the information from?

Most data comes from official government websites, or from news articles about new governments, cabinet reshuffles, etc.. Wikipedia and Wikidata are also very helpful signals of changes, as in many countries these are updated quicker than official sources.

Can I reuse this data?

The information visible on the website is part of a much larger dataset that also includes many other key positions (including legislators, ambassadors, etc), more sub-national data, more historic data, additional biographical data, and reconciliation with Wikidata.

That dataset is available on request under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 License. Please contact me for more information, or for commercial enquiries.

Who are you?

The data is curated on an ongoing basis by Tony Bowden. Paul Youlten and Friedrich Lindenberg provided a lot of initial support. The logo was created by Why.

But this also builds on the work of many, many others: particularly everyone who has contributed political information to Wikipedia or Wikidata, or has worked on all the wonderful Free Software this relies so heavily on. A lot of heavy lifting is made much simpler thanks to wikibase-cli, wtf_wikipedia, jq, and qsv (née xsv).

How can I get in touch?

Email me at tony@peppercat.org, or talk to me on Twitter @tmtm.