If you want to contribute data to the EveryPolitician project, great! And thanks!
Furthermore, if you're looking at this file (CONTRIBUTING.md) then
you're probably familiar with GitHub and pull requests.
So please, if you want to help: don't send us data in a pull request for everypolitician-data. Instead, please read our "contributing" page which is our appeal for data sources.
(or Why it's futile to add data directly to the datafiles in this repo)
If you have a look at the pull requests coming into this repo, updating the data, you'll see there have been a lot -- and nearly all of them are coming from the EveryPoliticianBot account.
So although this repo does indeed contain all the lovely EveryPolitician data, we populate it by adding sources to the automatic process that builds the data by combining them. That process, running as EveryPolitician bot, then submits the data it's built as pull requests to this repo. Human members of the EveryPolitician team then merge those pull requests.
The practical consequence of this is that if we make any changes to data directly in the repo here, those changes will be lost. They will be overridden by the next update, because we rebuild the data from scratch.
Instead, the data must be added upstream, so that it is included in those updates.
So if you have data for us, please read this guidance and then get in touch with us at [email protected] so we can add the source.
If you only have static data, that's fine; but get in touch so we can find a way to make it available to our bot upstream.
There's a growing collection of repos that contain code used by the EveryPolitician project team: see the everypolitician/everypolitician repo for a jumping-off point. That's got a README linking/explaining some of the core repos.
— EveryPolitician team