So, I had the day off, and decided to fiddle a little with Wikidata. After some experimenting, it now knows about:
- 1516 Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (1801-present)
- 194 Acts of the Parliament of Great Britain (1707-1800)
- 329 Acts of the Parliament of England (to 1707)
- 20 Acts of the Parliament of Scotland (to 1707)
- 19 Acts of the Parliament of Ireland (to 1800)
(Acts of the modern devolved parliaments for NI, Scotland, and Wales will follow.)
Each has a specific “instance of” property – Q18009569, for example, is “act of the Parliament of Scotland” – and is set up as a subclass of the general “act of parliament”. At the moment, there’s detailed subclasses for the UK and Canada (which has a seperate class for each province’s legislation) but nowhere else. Yet…
These numbers are slightly fuzzy – it’s mainly based on Wikipedia articles and so there are a small handful of cases where the entry represents a particular clause (eg Q7444697, s.4 and s.10 of the Human Rights Act 1998), or cases hwere multiple statutes are treated in the same article (eg Q1133144, the Corn Laws), but these are relatively rare and, mostly, it’s a good direct correspondence. (I’ve been fairly careful to keep out oddities, but of course, some will creep in…)
So where next? At the moment, these almost all reflect Wikipedia articles. Only 34 have a link to (English) Wikisource, though I’d guess there’s about 200-250 statutes currently on there. Matching those up will definitely be valuable; for legislation currently in force and on the Statute Law Database, it would be good to be able to crosslink to there as well.