Talk:List of acts of the 116th United States Congress

Adding information about the Wildlife Conservation & Anti-Trafficking Act
Hello! I'd like to propose the following text to be added to this article's page:

"On January 30th, 2019, the Wildlife Conservation & Anti-Trafficking Act was introduced to the 116th Congress by John Garamendi (D-CA) and Don Young (R-CA). Don Young and Madeleine Bordallo (D-GU) originally introduced this act on May 8th, 2018. The Wildlife Conservation & Anti-Trafficking Act strengthens wildlife crime detection through the mandate of whistleblower awards to citizens and NGOs whose reports on wildlife crime result in a successful prosecution. The bill also aims to increase wildlife conservation funding and expand transnational law to combat wildlife crimes at the source. "

References supporting change: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/864/actions

I had originally posted this on the Talk page for "List of bills in the 116th United States Congress (section)", but was advised by another user to place my proposition here. I hope that this is the right place! I would also like to disclose that I am serving as a paid editor: I am employed by Kohn, Kohn, and Colapinto, LLP. I am also associated with the National Whistleblower Center. I am receiving compensation in the form of payment for hourly work on article edits. If this calls for my using the Conflict of Interest form, please let me know and I will make sure to propose these edits in good faith and in accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use. This information is also disclosed on my user page and my user talk page. Let me know if I need to fix or change something! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sa 3003 (talk • contribs) 04:00, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Reply 1-FEB-2019
Regards,  Spintendo   06:36, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
 * The title of the article is "Lists of acts of the 116th US Congress". An Act of Congress is a statute enacted by the Congress as a whole.
 * The proposed information deals with House Resolution #864 which was introduced 2 days ago on January 30th in only one part of the Congress. HR #864 is not an Act of Congress until it is enacted by both houses. Thus, the information in the edit request proposal does not fit the description of the article.

How can we use/levarage wikidata?
It seems to me that this article/list is really something that should be a database query to Wikidata. Something like: [https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Fitem%20%3FitemLabel%20%28CONCAT%28%22Public%20Law%20%22%2C%3Fpl%2C%20%22.%20%22%2C%20STRBEFORE%28%3Fstat%2C%22-%22%29%2C%20%22%20Stat%20%22%2C%20STRAFTER%28%3Fstat%2C%22-%22%29%2C%22.%22%29%20as%20%3Ftext%29%20%0AWHERE%20%7B%0A%20%20%3Fitem%20wdt%3AP3825%20%3Fstat%20.%0A%20%20%3Fitem%20wdt%3AP3837%20%3Fpl%20.%0A%20%20FILTER%20%28CONTAINS%28%3Fpl%2C%20%27116-%27%29%29%20.%0A%20%20SERVICE%20wikibase%3Alabel%20%7B%20bd%3AserviceParam%20wikibase%3Alanguage%20%22en%2Cen%22%20%20%7D%0A%7D%0ALIMIT%201000 SELECT ?item ?itemLabel (CONCAT("Public Law ",?pl, ". ", STRBEFORE(?stat,"-"), " Stat ", STRAFTER(?stat,"-"),".") as ?text) WHERE { ?item wdt:P3825 ?stat. ?item wdt:P3837 ?pl. FILTER (CONTAINS(?pl, '116-')). SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,en" } } LIMIT 1000]

which returns

Except of course there seem to be only 6 laws from the 116th congress in Wikidata. But it seems like it'd be better to put them there, in a structured way, rather than in this free-form table. Then for instance, uspl could look up laws in Wikidata and return the '''134 Stat. 1041 form and the H.R. 8900 forms in the case where, as here P.L. 116-215''' is not live-linked yet in most places (number was assigned today).

I'm not quite sure how to get us there, and how to, e.g. make this page the result of the above Wikidata query. Can someone help with that?

Thanks! jhawkinson (talk) 20:44, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
 * you all have been involved in some of these edits on Wikidata, do you have thoughts? Thanks. jhawkinson (talk) 23:07, 14 December 2020 (UTC)


 * I would support such an initiative, although I do not have the experience or knowledge required to pull something like it off. Wikidata does feel better suited for structured data like this.  23:50, 15 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Looks like we've got some discussion going at d:Wikidata:Project_chat; sorry if I fragmented things in too many places trying to find the right place to talk about it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by jhawkinson (talk • contribs) 23:21, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata table experiment
&sum; 23 items.

More signed bills to be added
Just a reminder that Trump signed multiple bills into law in the past 1-2 weeks that still haven't been added to this article: 1,2,3

Additionally, Trump signed four bills on 1/5, presumably passed by the 116th Congress but signed after the 117th Congress began: I don't know whether these should be added to this article or the 117th Congress equivalent article. --1990&#39;sguy (talk) 17:02, 5 January 2021 (UTC)


 * We'll go by the public law number when those are issued. If they're P.L. 116-261 and soforth, they'll go here. If they're P.L. 117-1 and up, they'll go into the 117th congress's article. But they'll certainly be here, if it was passed by congress in 2020, it's the 116th. jhawkinson (talk) 17:08, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Removal of USStatute?
You made a rather extensive edit removing many of the instances of USStatute in favor of USPL here, with the es of "GPO has published laws." Can you please explain? That summary doesn't justify the edit, and for an edit of that size, I think you should have sought consensus here first. My thinking is that where we have the HR/S and Stat. numbers, we should keep them, regardless of whether GPO has published the law. And furthermore, that gross changes like that are better made in the template (see months-recent discussion in Template Talk:USPL rather than here. What's the justification for removal? jhawkinson (talk) 00:19, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * PL numbers 1 through 214 used uspl, and I thought that USStatute was a temporary template used before the GPO published the law. If you are right, then we should use USStatute for all of the laws (not just those starting with 215). --Numberguy6 (talk) 00:26, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I like uspl and don't really see the benefit of the Stat. numbers but I'm not a lawyer. The congress.gov link to the bill could be useful, but including the date like "enacted January 13, 2021" is not necessary since we already have a column for the date. Reywas92Talk 01:09, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I wasn't terribly clear about the scope of the "experiment" I instantiated in December:

|


 * the point was, going forward, when adding new laws to the table, I (and it's pretty much been me) would use USStatute instead of USPL, because it provided a workable link at the time of issuance. And because it was somewhat of an experiment, I didn't feel the need to go back and programatically generate the USStatute links for all 215 of the prior public laws. As a general rule, it doesn't make sense to go around changing articles when external facts changed (e.g. like GPO publishing a law) — that's the kind of thing that templates are good at, and indeed USPL (and USStatute which depends on it) offers that text ("GPO has not yet published law") only for those laws that GPO has not yet published. Still, I would have expected discussion before reverting the experiment, but I also could have made more (any, really) noise about it here. (aside: What is up with them? It's been a month since the last published law and there are quite a few still lingering from the last Congress. Maybe GPO staff moonlights in the Senate Parliamentarian's Office?).
 * Now, there could be a reasonable argument that this article should be exempt from that (because it's not a normal article with a casual reference to the public law, it's the place in Wikipedia where people might look for authority on most laws), but I don't think I would agree (happy to go into more detail later). Anyhow, absent compelling justification, I am going to put them back.
 * This discussion isn't really a referendum on the behavior of USStatute. It is the only template that works for laws before GPO has published them, because it is the only template with sufficient information (the HR/S number) to link to the text. If you don't like the way it is displayed, you should probably start a discussion on its talk page about that, but I don't think it would be a good idea to make a 3rd template or change the signature of the 2 that we have, so we're somewhat stuck with it. There is not a huge benefit to the Stat. numbers given the other information (other than for formal citation), but, again, it's not really a choice we have. jhawkinson (talk) 02:15, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

Actually, several of the laws haven't been published by the GPO, even though USStatute said they were. You can re-add USStatute if you want. --Numberguy6 (talk) 04:41, 7 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's correct—almost. The template doesn't say they were published, it just doesn't say they haven't been published, a subtle distinction. See the recent history of the template. The template knows the most recent published law and displays the message for numbers above that. That worked great when they published laws in order, but then they started skipping around ("leaving holes") and so the task of the template is harder. I figured the safe thing to do is to indicate when we know a law has not yet been published, and otherwise be silent. So that means, today, anything above 116-304 gets that message, because 116-304 has been published. But 116-303 has not, etc. It's possible to do better than this, but given the expected changes to this area using WikiData (see above few sections), it doesn't make sense to contort the template mechanism into dealing with this kind of thing that it's not designed to do (although it is technically possible to do lookup tables in templates, for sure!). Thanks re re-adding. jhawkinson (talk) 05:09, 7 March 2021 (UTC)