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German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

abstimmung.eu

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Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#131

Post by 6510 »

mrweasel wrote: post #84
nikeee wrote: post #16

There are also a repository containing some laws in markdown format on GitHub. They even used PRs for actual changes proposed by the parties in the parliament. Also, the commits have their proper date, so you can `git blame` on the laws and even see which president signed-off that change. Sadly, it is unmaintained. https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

German laws might work different, but I'm not really under the impression that software version control is really that compatible with law making. In source code we replace or modify the parts that doesn't work in place. Many laws does not work like that, they are a labyrinth of add ons. A new law is introduced with wordings like "This replaces the words "small businesses" with "nuclear rockets" in the law on "Workpl…

I one time learn that the cluster f of exceptions surprisingly quickly turns into something you [almost] cant replicate in software.

Of course one could also argue that it isn't a problem with poorly designed laws but that our programming languages are ill equipped for it.

Then again, the funniest thing I've seen in law: Where an engineer would make a nice drawing with the size of things neatly organized into available space, a law maker will spray all the numbers and description randomly all over the place as if to prevent anyone from ever building the described.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#132

Post by 6510 »

It would be fascinating to have side by side comparison for all countries and history. It would be full of brilliant and stupid solutions. It should really be convenient enough that law makers cant continue to pretend to be the first one to address a topic.

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#133

Post by hulium »

Bewelge wrote: post #119
jandinter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintain a repository with all German legal acts which is up to date: https://github.com/jandinter/gesetze-im-internet I scrape the official website ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de ) once a week. The repository contains the "official" XML files with a formatting that is more focussed on presentation than on the logical structure of the legal acts, unfortunately ( https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/dtd/1.01/gii…

Very cool! I came across your project last year while building https://digebu.de . I wanted to build an "IDE-inspired" law reader. It has selection highlighting and you can open references within the same window. It scrapes gesetze-im-internet.de daily, processes the XML to JSONS and builds static HTML pages, hosted on Github pages. The entire build process for the 6000+ pages takes 5-10 minutes. It uses up less than…

> Turns out all available versions (gesetze-im-internet, dejure.org, buzer.de) had at least a couple of small mistakes.

Can you say more about what these small mistakes were? Would they affect the interpretation of the law?

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#135

Post by Bewelge »

hulium wrote: post #133
Bewelge wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool! I came across your project last year while building https://digebu.de . I wanted to build an "IDE-inspired" law reader. It has selection highlighting and you can open references within the same window. It scrapes gesetze-im-internet.de daily, processes the XML to JSONS and builds static HTML pages, hosted on Github pages. The entire build process for the 6000+ pages takes 5-10 minutes. It uses up less than…

> Turns out all available versions (gesetze-im-internet, dejure.org, buzer.de) had at least a couple of small mistakes. Can you say more about what these small mistakes were? Would they affect the interpretation of the law?

In the example I checked the mistakes wouldn't have changed the interpretation. It were mistakes like additional or missing commas, missing spaces or missing articles.

buzer.de actually has a list of things that differ in their consolidation compared to gesetze-im-internet.de: https://www.buzer.de/quality.htm

In that list you can actually find mistakes that would alter the interpretation. But I think this also sounds worse than it is. It's just a funny thought that whatever source you are using, you are essentially trusting one party to not have made any mistakes, consolidating 1000s of pages of pdfs :)

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#138

Post by globalise83 »

plextoria wrote: post #128
throwaway290 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws. So a country only needs to rewrite all the laws to adopt versioning, cool. In reality both have can be used, commits to see what changed by whom and wordings that says what changed

> So a country only needs to rewrite all the laws to adopt versioning, cool. No, they only need to start using versioning in order to adopt versioning. Think of an "initial git commit"

"Grundgesetz MVP commit"

Re: German parliament votes as a Git contribution graph

#140

Post by mojifwisi »

eru wrote: post #123
seba_dos1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have once used git to track proposed changes to existing legal texts - it was very helpful for that already.

I think the main thing you'd want to do to make git useful for human readable text, like laws or a novel, is to put each sentence on its own line. By default, git's diff and merge want lines-of-code to be meaningful and are set up for that.

There's always git diff --word-diff, so a website tracking changes in laws in a Git repo could display diffs using that flag by default.
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