Occupations of persons from Panama Papers

Can we get an overview of the occupations of the persons associated with the Panama Papers? Well … that might be difficult, but we can get a biased plot by using the listing in Wikidata, where persons associated with the Panama Papers seems to be tagged and where their occupation(s) is listed. It produces the plot below.

It is fairly straightforward to construct such a bubble chart given the new plotting capabilities in the Wikidata Query Service. Dutch Wikipedian Gerard Meijssen seems to have been the one who has entered the information in Wikidata linking Panama Papers to persons via the ‘significant event‘ property. How complete he yet has managed to do this I do not know. Our Danish Wikipedian Ole Palnatoke Andersen set up a page on the Danish Wikipedia at Diskussion:Panama-papirerne/Wikidata tabulating with the nice Listeria tool of Magnus Manske. Modifying Ole’s SPARQL query we can get the count of occupations for the persons associated with the Panama Papers in Wikidata.

SELECT ?occupationLabel(count(distinct ?person) as ?count) WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P793 wd:Q23702848 ; wdt:P106 ?occupation .   
  service wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
} group by ?occupationLabel

Some people may see that politicians are the largest group, but that might simply be an artifact of the notability criterion of Wikidata: Only people who are somewhat notable or are linked to something notable are likely to be included in Wikidata, e.g., the common businessman/woman may not (yet?) be represented in Wikidata.

The bubble chart cuts letters of the words for the occupation. ‘murd’ is murderer. Joaquín Guzmán has his occupation set to murderer in Wikidata, – without source…