Methodology

• Every sitting member of a covered legislature, with their seat and the party or group they sit with.
• Ministers and other office holders, including party spokespeople, leaders and whips.
• Candidates at the next election, once a party or an authoritative outlet names them, and then from the official candidate list.

Members get the official contact details their parliament publishes. Candidates get links to the pages and channels they publish themselves. We never copy personal email addresses or phone numbers.

Each section of a page ends with a line naming its sources, the type of each and the date we recorded it. When sources disagree, the stronger source for that kind of fact wins and the disagreement is logged for review. The types are:

• official. Official sources: parliaments, government departments, electoral commissions.
• our research. A person read the cited document and entered the fact by hand.
• party. A party's own website: its members, spokespeople and candidates.
• news report. Public broadcasters and major newsrooms with published corrections policies, reporting what a party or official body announced.
• our research. Earlier research by the team, used to find people, never on its own to publish them.
• lead. Wikipedia and Wikidata. Used only to find leads; a lead is published only once the page it cites confirms it.

Behind each type is a confidence score from 0 to 100. It is in every page's data file (the .json version of the page) and on the sources page.

Every registered source, with its licence and how we access it.

Before nominations close, much of who is standing comes from announcements. Each person's status for the next election is one of:

Nominated

On the official candidate list.

Announced

Named by their party or reported by an authoritative outlet. Not final until the official list is published.

Expected to stand

Our estimate for a sitting member with no public announcement either way. It is an educated guess, not a confirmed candidacy.

Not standing

A source says so, or the official list leaves them out.

Once the official candidate list is out, it replaces every announced candidacy.

Each issue page covers one of about 20 policy areas. The list is the same in every place we cover, so an area keeps its address when offices are renamed, split or merged.

• An office goes on the page its title names: a health office on the health page. Where a title doesn't say, we place it by what the office's department does, and write down why. The placement records are published with the data.
• An office can sit on more than one page when its work spans them.
• Every executive office sits on at least one page. Party spokespeople are placed the same way; any we haven't placed yet are listed for review.
• "Who holds which part" groups the responsibilities the government formally delegates, clause by clause, as its published schedule words them. The grouping into parts is ours.
• Parties appear in order of seats held, then by name. "None recorded" means we have no record of an office, not that the party has no view.

Collectors record what each source says, with a stored copy. A reconciler turns those records into the published data and reports every change. A person reviews each change before it reaches the site. Nothing is deleted: people who leave office keep their record, with an end date.

People found only through discovery sources are not published until a stronger source confirms them.

The site has no colour of its own. Party colours come from each party's website. Chambers are drawn seat for seat from their official seating plans, from the presiding officer's chair. Every picture is also said in words.

Who To Lobby is built by Topham Guerin. It presents facts neutrally and does not favour any party. See corrections if something is wrong.