Two years ago, I spoke at the Canadian Association of Law Library’s conference and gave a presentation called, What is Wikidata and Why You Should Do Data Entry for the Greater Good.

At that time, there were only six items in Wikidata that had CanLii identifiers.

Now, there are over 11,000 entries. Most of these are for Supreme Court of Canada decisions that I uploaded last year, with the help of OpenRefine and the CanLii API.

In many ways, I consider this personal project finished. As new SCC decisions are released, I add them to Wikidata but the backfiles are done.

I continue to work on another project that I started and discussed last year –the adding and augmenting Wikidata records for all active Canadian legal review journals.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons. The main reason is that I believe that capturing this information could provide a rich dataset that could be queried in many useful ways that our library catalogues, research guides, and “chat ai bots” cannot readily answer. I imagine that these questions could include

Which Canadian legal review journals ….

• … publish articles in French?
• … are open access?
• … are also published in CanLii?
• … are indexed in HeinOnline?
• … can be found in a trusted digital repository?
• … are published by Canadian universities?

And this leads me to the reason why I feel that my Supreme Court of Canada Wikidata project still doesn’t feel finished to me.

I still want to be able to query Wikidata and ask this kind of question:

• In what Supreme Court of Canada decisions was Access Copyright an intervener?

For those of you know you aren’t familiar with what an intervener (or intervenor) is, let’s read Wikipedia together:

In law, intervention is a procedure to allow a nonparty, called intervenor (also spelled intervener) to join ongoing litigation, either as a matter of right or at the discretion of the court, without the permission of the original litigants. The basic rationale for intervention is that a judgment in a particular case may affect the rights of nonparties, who ideally should have the right to be heard.

Canada

Intervenors are most common in appellate proceedings but can also appear at other types of legal proceeding such as a trial.

In general, it is within the discretion of the court to allow or refuse an application to intervene. There are exceptions to that, however. For example, under subrule 61(4) of the Rules of the Supreme Court of Canada, if the court has stated a constitutional question, the attorney general of any province or territory or of the federal government, may intervene “as of right,” without the need to be granted leave to intervene.

Courts will tend to allow an application to intervene if the applicant will provide a different perspective on the issues before the court, without expanding those issues

Intevenors are listed in Canadian Supreme Court decisions, but they are not indexed as searchable field in the the Supreme Court’s Lexum platform…

… or in CanLii:

I have a professional interest in this matter because I am collaborating with a faculty member on a project about intervenors at the Canadian Supreme Court. But this work does not involve any use of Wikidata.

From what I can see, the work of enumerating and categorizing interveners at the Supreme Court appears to have been done repeatedly by several different scholars, all of whom have published tables and summaries of their data collection work but not their full dataset. There are a couple of public spreadsheets that provide structured information of years of Supreme Court of Canada decisions, such as whether a majority decision was made, but none of these include information on who may have acted as an intervener.

I would love to be able to add this kind of information to Wikidata, but there’s no property of ‘intervener’. Last year I made a proposal to add this property.

This is what I had said was my motivation:

Half of Supreme Court of Canada decisions are made with third-parties called interveners and it has even been said that you can tell how important a case by the number of interveners allowed to weigh in on a pending legal decision (https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4029&context=scholarly works) The role of interveners are of great interest to legal scholars, political scientists, and activists. At present, legal cases allow for a plaintiff and a respondent to be properties of a legal case, but not third party intervenes who are also allowed to present documents to the court. Interveners should be considered an ‘input’ to a legal decision and not an ‘outcome’ and as such, they don’t belong as ‘part of’ a decision of the judges. Happy to clarify any of the above.

Unfortunately, no one who follows Wikidata Property Proposals lent support for this suggestion, and so the proposal was not followed through.

I was thinking about putting this proposal forward one more time, but before I do so, I wanted to get confirmation that I knew at least one legal / political science-minded / librarian / Canadian wikipedian who would support such a measure, on the proposal’s own merits.

(I hope this sort of public entreating is consider okay within the Wikidata community. I hope it is understood that this is meant as a good faith attempt to find those who might be interested in adding Intervener to Wikidata before going through the vetting process. )

If you, dear reader, would be willing to lend your name to support this proposal, could you let me know either below of via one of my socials? If I get some positive response, I’ll make the proposal again and broadcast the link on my socials. Or you can make the proposal and I will support you!

Thank you!