How GovGlobe counts

Where every officeholder, date and government on this site comes from, what the sources get wrong, and the rules we use to catch it.

GovGlobe is a ledger. It holds 195 countries, 837 offices, 33,169 people and 69,995 tenures, and every one of those rows came from a public source that anyone can check. This page explains where each kind of row comes from, what is wrong with each source, and the rules the software follows to keep those errors off the page. When a rule fails, the failure goes on the corrections page.

Who holds each office

Officeholders come from Wikidata, the public-domain database behind Wikipedia's infoboxes. Wikidata records that a person held an office through a statement called "position held," with optional start and end dates. GovGlobe reads those statements for every head of state and head of government on earth, for the U.S. federal offices back to 1789, and for every U.S. governor.

Wikidata is the best open record of who held power, and it is also written by volunteers. We have found five kinds of error in it. Each one now has a rule.

Fictional officeholders. The raw "position held" data for President of the United States includes Thor, Doom 2099 and a character called Gonzo the Mechanical Bastard. Every GovGlobe query is limited to items Wikidata classifies as human beings. With that limit, the presidency shows 47 presidencies held by 45 people. Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump each served two terms that were not consecutive, so each is one person with two tenures.

Stale incumbents. Wikidata records a country's current leader in two places: on the country itself ("head of state," "head of government") and on the person ("position held"). The two drift. When this ledger was first built, the country records still named King Salman as prime minister of Saudi Arabia, an office Mohammed bin Salman has held since September 2022. They also named seventeen past prime ministers of Luxembourg as sitting at once. GovGlobe now treats the country record as a list of candidates. It drops any claim Wikidata's editors have marked as rejected, and when one candidate is marked as the current value, it prefers that one. That is how Australia's governor-general of 2014–19 stopped being shown as its head of state. Then it checks each candidate against the person records. A candidate whose every term in that office has ended is not the incumbent. When all candidates fail that test, the incumbent is the person whose term began after every other term in the office had ended.

Terms counted as breaks. Wikidata often ends a term at an election the holder then won. Pedro Sánchez's first term as prime minister of Spain ends in April 2019 and his second starts in January 2020, though he governed in between. The length of a gap doesn't settle it. Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece had a gap of only a month in 2023, but it was a real break: a caretaker, Ioannis Sarmas, was prime minister while the election was held. So GovGlobe says someone has served continuously unless another person held the office in between. The lineage tables still show each term as the source records it.

The rule is only as good as the source's record of caretakers. Pakistan's caretaker prime minister of 2023–24, Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, is recorded in the source under a separate office, so the prime minister's lineage skipped him. That is one of the cases below.

Names that are not names. When a person has no English label, Wikidata's query service returns the item number instead. France's president was shown on this site as "Q3052772" and India's prime minister as "Q1058" until we caught it. GovGlobe now fetches a name in any language before it falls back. The build fails if any officeholder on the site is still named by a number.

Undated terms. Some records have no start date, or no end date. GovGlobe does not guess. A missing start shows as "not recorded." A past holder with no end date also shows as "not recorded," and never as a current holder. The ledger holds 722 past heads of state or government whose end date the source does not give.

The editor's overrides

Some errors cannot be caught by a rule, because the source is simply missing a fact. Wikidata does not record that Chuck Grassley became president pro tempore of the Senate again in January 2025, so the source still shows Patty Murray in the post. For cases like that, GovGlobe keeps a short list of corrections. Each one is checked against a primary source and applied on top of the data, and the build fails if any of them goes missing. There are 6, and this is all of them:

What kind of government each country has

Wikidata's "basic form of government" field is inconsistent. It once described the United States as "directorial," which is Switzerland's system. GovGlobe uses the CIA World Factbook's "government type" field instead and shows its wording as written.

Every government in the United States

The Census Bureau counts every government in the country every five years. GovGlobe loads the 2022 unit file: 90,837 governments, including 3,031 counties, 19,491 municipalities, 16,214 townships, 12,546 independent school districts and 39,555 special districts. The Census Bureau does not count dependent school systems as governments, because they are run by another government. Our first load included 1,313 of them, which was wrong. The total now equals the Census figure exactly, and the build fails if it drifts.

The Census Bureau counted who runs those governments once, in 1992, and then stopped. Nobody else keeps that record. For almost every local government, GovGlobe knows the government exists and does not know who holds its offices. The map shows that as fog instead of a guess.

Congress

Every member of Congress since 1789 comes from the public-domain legislator files maintained by the unitedstates project, which are drawn from the official Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Thirteen early Speakers of the House have no recorded start date in the source, and the Speaker's page says so.

What we do not do

GovGlobe does not rate officeholders, score ideology, or describe a government beyond what its constitution and the Factbook say. It does not republish other publications' reporting. It does not index a page until an editor has written it up. The 195 country pages and thousands of county pages are generated from the ledger for readers, not for search engines. Each one carries a noindex tag until it has earned an editorial profile.

Last updated September 22, 2026.