Coding rules

In order to ensure consistency for the data in WeSIS as well as the documentation in WeSISpedia, several coding rules and documentation standards have been established.

Data collection

Date Time: Dates, e.g. the introduction of laws, election dates etc. shall be entered as YYYY.MM.DD.

For date times the following rules apply in descending order:

1. Whenever possible, add the complete date.
2. If an event (like an election) took place on more than one day enter the first day of the period.
3. If the day is unknown, enter the last of the month and add a new column or field "day_na" = 1.
4. If the month is unknown, enter the last of the year and add a new column or field "month_na" = 1.
5. The default reference date for all yearly data is December 31, if not explicitly stated otherwise on the indicator page.

Country codes: Several rules apply when assigning country codes to the data:

1. COW country codes are preferred over V-Dem and ISO codes.
2. Whenever possible, data should be collected for each entity separately.
3. Whenever possible, all country codes should be added to ensure comparability.

Note: V-Dem country codes aim at providing a consistent time series for an entity (e.g. Korea is subsumed under South Korea). This way, disassociating data for both entities becomes cumbersome if they should be analyzed separately. Instead, WeSIS' aim is to provide data as "disaggregated" as possible allowing for a flexible case selection and aggregation afterwards.

Technical variable names: Within WeSIS every indicator has a technical name. The topics define the initial abbreviation followed by an underscore. Add a meaningful suffix afterwards using underscores, e.g. polnat_election_date (not polnat_electiondate) for an indicator capturing the election date.

Social policies (y)

Topic	Abbreviation
Old age and survivors	old
Labour and labour market	labor
Health and long-term care	health
Education and training	edu
Family policies	family
Gender aspects	gend

Domestic conditions (x1)

Topic	Abbreviation
Policy legacies	polleg
Economic and financial factors	econnat
Political factors	polnat
Social structure	socstr
Culture	cult
Geography	geo

Interdependencies and relations (x2)

Topic	Abbreviation
Communication	comm
Political institutional linkages	polrel
Economic relations	econrel
Migration	migra
Violent conflicts	confl

Spelling

BE or AE: In WeSISpedia American English shall be used.

Capitalization: Indicator names (and hence page titles) shall not be capitalized. For general guidelines please refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style as well.

Citation

Citation style has not been fixed yet, but will be added very soon.