Property talk:P641

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sport
sport that the subject participates or participated in or is associated with

Description	sport in which the entity participates or belongs to
Represents	type of sport (Q31629), sport (Q349)
Data type	Item
Domain	any item (note: this should be moved to the property statements)
Allowed values	According to this template: subclass of (P279) sport (Q349) According to statements in the property: When possible, data should only be stored as statements
Example	Gediminas Grinius (Q20731566) → ultra-trail (Q3548048) 2009 Table Tennis European Championships (Q324758) → table tennis (Q3930) Sigulda bobsleigh, luge, and skeleton track (Q2560782) → skeleton (Q186190) bobsleigh (Q177275) luge (Q273285) National Basketball Association (Q155223) → basketball (Q5372)
Tracking: same	no label (Q42533395)
Tracking: usage	Category:Pages using Wikidata property P641 (Q23908966)
Tracking: local yes, WD no	Category:Sports not on Wikidata (Q115008597)
See also	sports discipline competed in (P2416), competition class (P2094)
Lists	Category:P641 only reports Items with no other statements Most recently created items Items with novalue claims Items with unknown value claims Usage history (total) Usage history (main statement) Database reports/Humans with missing claims/P641 Database reports/Constraint violations/P641 Map Random list
Proposal discussion	Proposal discussion
Current uses	Total 2,148,623 Main statement 2,127,474 99% of uses Qualifier 21,113 1% of uses Reference 36 <0.1% of uses
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Explanations [Edit]

sport (P641) is a very powerful Wikidata property to relate any item to a particular sport (Q349) or a subclass thereof (connected by subclass of (P279)). This documentation gives advice how to use sport (P641) properly.

Types

The fact that there are no formal constraints regarding the type of items at which this property can be used is both flexible and challenging. While you cannot produce formal mistakes that show up on any maintenance lists here, there are often better suited properties for many, if not most of the possible applications of sport (P641). You are therefore advised to check the usage of other, more specific properties and prefer them over this one, if ever possible. There is a short list of common sub-optimal, yet formally correct usages given in the following, along with alternatives:

Person items

okay: Haile Gebrselassie (Q171500)sport (P641)athletics (Q542) — however, this statement does not tell us much about Haile Gebrselassie (Q171500)’s role in the sport of athletics (Q542).

better: Haile Gebrselassie (Q171500)occupation (P106)athletics competitor (Q11513337) — the occupation (P106) property is capable of giving precise information about his career in athletics (Q542).

Sports club items, but also sports event items, etc.

okay: AFC Ajax (Q81888)sport (P641)association football (Q2736) — however, this statement does not tell anything about AFC Ajax (Q81888)’s role in the sport of association football (Q2736).

better: AFC Ajax (Q81888)instance of (P31)association football club (Q476028) — use the instance of (P31) property with a structural item such as association football club (Q476028) in addition to P641.

This list could be extended by other common item types, but you can probably already see what the point is. If you consider sport (P641) as the very last resort if there is really no other possibility to relate an item to a type of sport, then you will probably use it correctly.

As of September 2016, many items of persons for instance use sport (P641) and occupation (P106) at the same time. Given the nature of sport (P641) statements, data users are advised to rely both on P641 and more specific statements such as occupation (P106) in case of sports persons, rather than querying for sport (P641) only.

It has to be noted, though, that sport (P641) is a very useful initial property to add to items without any statements, which can then be found and completed with more specific properties by specialized users.

Values

On the value side anything is formally accepted which is a subclass of (P279) sport (Q349). It is perfectly fine to have a chain of subclass-relations to the sport item as well. However, only suitable type of sport (Q31629) items should of course subclass the sport item, and other usages are to be replaced. You can find usages of sport (P641) with non-sport-subclassing items at the P641 constraint violations page.

Subclasses of sport can be queried by using several Wikidata tool, which all come with specific advantages:

• Wikidata Query Service
• Wikidata Generic Tree (Tool labs)
• Wikidata Dynamic List (Tool labs)
• Wikidata Graph Builder (external link)

Although formally not necessary, you can also add an instance of (P31) type of sport (Q31629) statement to items about types of sport (additionally to the formally required subclassing of sport (Q349)).

Value type “sport (Q349), fictional sport (Q20037067), type of sport (Q31629)”: This property should use items as value that contain property “instance of (P31), subclass of (P279)”. On these, the value for instance of (P31), subclass of (P279) should be an item that uses subclass of (P279) with value sport (Q349), fictional sport (Q20037067), type of sport (Q31629) (or a subclass thereof). (Help)

List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P641#Value type Q349, Q20037067, Q31629, hourly updated report, SPARQL

Property “practiced by (P3095)” declared by target items of “sport (P641)”: If [item A] has this property with value [item B], [item B] is required to have property “practiced by (P3095)”. (Help)

Exceptions are possible as rare values may exist. Exceptions can be specified using exception to constraint (P2303).
List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P641#Target required claim P3095, SPARQL, SPARQL (by value)

Allowed entity types are Wikibase item (Q29934200): the property may only be used on a certain entity type (Help)

List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P641#Entity types, hourly updated report

Scope is as main value (Q54828448), as qualifier (Q54828449): the property must be used by specified way only (Help)

List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P641#Scope, hourly updated report, SPARQL

None of hockey (Q1622659): value must not be any of the specified items.
Replacement property:
Replacement values: field hockey (Q1455), indoor hockey (Q974015) (Help)

Exceptions are possible as rare values may exist. Exceptions can be specified using exception to constraint (P2303).
List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P641#none of, SPARQL

Value ice skating (Q779272) will be automatically replaced to value speed skating (Q192431). Testing: TODO list

This property is being used by: en:template:Infobox sports league sport (proposed during property proposal), en:Template:Infobox sportsperson/Wikidata ru:Шаблон:Спортсмен eu:Txantiloi:Biografia infotaula automatikoa fr:Modèle:Infobox Compétition sportive, fr:Modèle:Infobox Compétition sportive/Bac à sable, fr:Modèle:Infobox Gymnaste hy:Կաղապար:Տեղեկաքարտ Համակարգչային խաղ, hy:Կաղապար:Տեղեկաքարտ Մարզադաշտ ky:Калып:Спортчу no:Mal:Infoboks sportsbiografi ro:Format:Infocaseta Competiție sportivă, ro:Format:Infocaseta Sportiv Please notify projects that use this property before big changes (renaming, deletion, merge with another property, etc.)

Constraints

Contemporaries:
if [item A] has this property (P641) linked to [item B],
then [item A] and [item B] have to coincide or coexist at some point of history.

Exceptions are possible as rare values may exist. Exceptions can be specified using exception to constraint (P2303).
List of violations of this constraint: Database reports/Constraint violations/P641#Contemporary, SPARQL

Charts

Values in sport (P641) See it in Wikidata Query Service	Instances of items with sport (P641) See it in Wikidata Query Service
Values in sports discipline competed in (P2416) See it in Wikidata Query Service	Instances of items with sports discipline competed in (P2416) See it in Wikidata Query Service
Items with sport (P641), but no P31/P279 See it in Wikidata Query Service	Items with sport (P641) only See it in Wikidata Query Service

Discussion

What is the correct means to show associated sport for a sporting body?

There has been uses of the property that are incorrect as prescribed by the conditions, though I am unsure of how else to add a correction. Example is Q190173 for International Ice Hockey Federation where clearly people wish to show that the federation is directly aligned with the sport of ice hockey (fair assumption), so people have used the combination of Property:Sport and the related sport. What therefore is the correct means to show the associated Sport?  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:29, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I am a bit new here ... so ... which condition does "International Ice Hockey Federation (Q190173) <sport (P641)> ice hockey (Q41466)" violate?

Another option would be "Ice Hockey World Championships (Q190163) <organizer (P664)> International Ice Hockey Federation (Q190173)", and then build a relationship between Ice Hockey World Championships (Q190163) to the sport(s) involved, which could need to describe specific rules used. That is what I am doing with Paralympic Games (Q73633). John Vandenberg (talk) 05:25, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

FYI: That item now uses part of (P361) instead. Personally I think this property here would also have been ok, too. After all organizations can also use this property. --Bthfan (talk) 11:40, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Sports

How do I make it possible to add wheelchair fencing or fencing? I wanted to add it to this as a sport she played but it is not possible. --LauraHale (talk) 09:38, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

How should we use this property?

Related discussions: Addition of P641 to players' entries, Removing occupation, Some questions about properties Talk:Q18616999

Property descriptions says "sport or discipline in which the entity participates or belongs to". However, it could be better not to add this on items about persons, but items about sports competitions etc. Persons can use occupation (P106) → tennis player (Q10833314). But there's another problem; amateurs, who are not competing as professionals, and thus P106 may be inappropriate for them. What do you think? --Stryn (talk) 16:40, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

FYI: There are currently 39,909 items with instance of (P31) → human (Q5) that are using sport (P641). --Stryn (talk) 19:12, 23 December 2014 (UTC) edited --Stryn (talk) 09:33, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

I have found many tennis player (and also tennis tournament) wikidata items, which (through more specific properties than sport (P641)) already define themselves as sport (P641)=tennis (Q847). Repeating that specification on a plethora of underlying wikidata items is undesirable: (1) it is contrary to existing Wikipedia practice; (2) it causes massive redundancy. Let me make the following comparison: on any language Wikipedia the following rule is maintained: if an article A belongs to category B, and category B belongs to category C, it is 'not done' to specify category C on article A although it would not be incorrect; but such a specification is considered undesirable and is, sooner of later, always removed by someone. For much the same reason, I always remove the specification sport (P641)=tennis (Q847) if the item already belongs to tennis (Q847) through some path. Example: 2015 Rogers Cup (women) (Q20769398) is part of (P361) 2015 Rogers Cup (Q20648606) which instance of (P31) Canadian Open (Q595467) which instance of (P31) tennis tournament (Q13219666) which has the specification sport (P641)=tennis (Q847). Vinkje83 (talk) 15:18, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I think we can continue its use on items for people. Up to Wikipedia to decide what re-use they want to make. --- Jura 06:52, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

For persons use occupation (P106) instead of sport (P641)

Although technically correct, having sport (P641) on person items is not very useful: it simply does not specify which role a person had in the field of sports given by the value. We have occupation (P106) that can deal with roles (competitor, coach, official, umpire, journalist/researcher/author in some field of sports, whatever…) and which is therefore much more suitable for persons than P641. Please note that P106 is not restricted to paid occupations, instead it collects notable (paid or unpaid) occupations a person has had. This is important for many fields of sports where notability can be achieved by amateurs. —MisterSynergy (talk) 17:21, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Is there any disadvantage in using P641 on persons?

Not sure if we will have a value for coach, official, umpire, journalist/researcher/author in every field. --- Jura 18:11, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

The “disadvantage” is that there are better and more precise methods to tag persons by using P106. In fact, without P106 there are situations that cannot be described correctly at all by P641 (multi-sport and/or multi-role sports persons—and there’s a bunch of those!). Wikidata:Notability allows us to create items that fulfill a “structural need”, we can therefore create missing items for coaches, officials, etc if there is a real need for that. We can put these “structural items” as subclasses of athlete (Q2066131), coach (Q41583), etc and perform clean queries later. All of that wouldn’t be possible with P641. And I don’t see any other advantage of having P641 on person items… do you? Nevertheless, P641 has of course its merits in many other situations that do not include person items.

Unfortunately, it was not clear how to use P106 for a long time and we’ve created a lot of P641 statements instead. Since I still see users adding a large number of P641s even if P106 is already properly set, I wrote this comment to make sure that … their effort for our project is available for something more useful than P641 on sports persons ;) There is a vast amount of work to do here! —MisterSynergy (talk) 18:46, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Property help page at Help:P641

I drafted one of these Property Translatable Help pages at Help:P641. You are invited to improve this page, and to add translations as soon as we have a somewhat stable version in place. —MisterSynergy (talk) 14:34, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Adding the Property sport (P641) with the help of a bot

Could be it possible to add the Property sport (P641) to all the articles of this category and this other of the english Wikipedia with the help of a bot? Many articles didn't have it and to add it manually it's too much job. The name of the property muss, of course, to be «triathlon». Thanks. Leonprimer (talk) 00:47, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Be careful not to add relationally redundant properties. If a sports person already has property occupation (P106)=triathlete (Q15306067) (which in itself already specifies sport (P641)=triathlon (Q10980)), that person inherits that property implicitly. Adding it to the person would be violating the anti-reduncancy principle of the relational database that wikidata is. Vinkje83 (talk) 12:38, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Limit to non-person items

I would suggest to limit this Property to items that do not describe a person. For persons, there are other more precise properties to relate to sport than P641. Steak (talk) 08:35, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

For many things there, but are there any disadvantages if we keep using it?
--- Jura 08:54, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Redundant data, possible inconsistencies, UI usability, difficult querying. —MisterSynergy (talk) 09:10, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I don't really see how. Do you have a sample? If the idea is that these people should eventually get P106, there isn't really a difficulty in querying it. It's just that you people get identified that wouldn't otherwise be. Is there a problem with helping get statements on items? Do you have any alternate suggestions?
--- Jura 09:18, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• We don’t need to keep it once proper P106s have been added. Still we do, and even worse users add P641 to items about humans that already have P106 set.
• P641 for humans is not systematically maintained, thus querying for ?human wdt:P31 wd:Q5; wdt:P641 ?some_sport always yields incomplete results.
• Existing P641 on human items engages infobox coders to use it directly, instead of using the properly maintained P106. Such a “flat Wikidata” might be convenient to use for infoboxes, but it is pretty difficult and expensive to maintain in good shape.
• I’m generally happy with temporary P641 on human items, but this is difficult for the constraints point of view.

—MisterSynergy (talk) 09:28, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

It's seems fairly trivial and inexpensive to ensure P641 are complete (if you feel this is needed).

I don't think we use temporary properties at Wikidata, at least beyond Sandbox properties.

If infobox coders make what you feel are incorrect assumptions, maybe descriptions you provided didn't mention it.
--- Jura 09:45, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• Sure, creating more redundancy is fairly easy. The other way (add P106 where missing) is more important, but also much more expensive since one needs to figure out roles individually. I do not think at all that adding more redundancy is needed here.
• If we cannot arrange temporary use, I prefer no use at all over the current situation. I am aware that temporary claims are not part of our mission, but you claim by yourself that this way “you [get] people […] identified that wouldn't otherwise be” (fixed order of words, I hope this is how it was meant). If there is no relation to a type of sport at all in place, this might be an acceptable preliminary idea. However, if there are more precise claims added later, the preliminary P641s are no longer necessary for anything.
• In case you refer to Help:P641 which I drafted to a large extent: the situation was already problematic before this help page was created, and I suppose this page is also not visible enough to really change much about the situation.

—MisterSynergy (talk) 12:37, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

So it's merely a theoretical concern that users might not be sufficiently interested in our content. I think we can live with that.
Obviously, for people who like Wikipedia categories, even P31=human (Q5) seems redundant. You really have to decide if you think adding P106 or P641 is expensive. It's a bit odd to see you argue both. If you think P106 is too complicated, maybe you want to focus on something else.
--- Jura 07:25, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

I don’t think “it’s too complicated” to add P106s, its just expensive to do so. —MisterSynergy (talk) 07:41, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

• +1, you have my full support. There are already other threads on this page requesting the same limitation. P641 is currently an ugly property that facilitates messy everything-links-to-everything relations.
• However, the longer we wait, the more difficult this becomes. sport (P641) is heavily used in Wikipedia infoboxes for sportspersons, and all of that would have to be replaced by occupation (P106) data. But since almost all occupation (P106) values of sportsperson professions are linked to their field of sport anyway through a field of this occupation (P425) claim (see query), the infoboxes could display the same data with only little technical modifications of the template code and no effort on Wikidata side.

—MisterSynergy (talk) 09:10, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

• I suppose there's difficulty that there are more sport (P641) values than occupation (P106) values for sports. --Infovarius (talk) 21:37, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
  • Not really. Missing items can be created, and if they are used they fall under the structural item notability criterium immediately. We have around 18k items about humans right now which have a P641 claim, but not a corresponding P106 claim (query). Most of the sports values you find there are not very exotic… —MisterSynergy (talk) 05:59, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

• • I know that we can create, but currently some of them not exist. P.S. Query with quantities. --Infovarius (talk) 10:16, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

I would propose that we just implement this constraint. Of course there will be many constraint violations at the beginning, but it will get less with time and it will be also a motivation for others to create more appropriate items. I think many issues can be solved by bot. One could also start with some more focused complex constraints, for example "has P641: football and P106: football player" and things like that and clean this up with bots. Steak (talk) 08:46, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

I have added the "no-person-constraint". I hope I have done it correctly. Steak (talk) 08:54, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

• I removed it again. There doesn't seem to be a clear consensus for it. We can't have temporary statements (as some seem to prefer) and we haven't really seen any good reason not to add them other than some unknown user with some undetermined usage problem. If you need help with adding missing statements, please ask for it. talk 10:30, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes please, P641 not for items about persons. It makes things messy. Stryn (talk) 13:04, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

•  Comment After going through a couple of items about tennis, I changed my mind on this. I don't think it's that helpful on people. For handling items without any statements, one could start directly with sportsperson P106 values.
  --- Jura 04:42, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Category:P641 only reports

The other day, I created a few reports and added them to the above category. They list the most recent items without any other statements than P641. Partially these get added by bot to avoid these items are fully without statements.
--- Jura 08:56, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

I added a chart of the most frequent values above: Property_talk:P641#Items_with_sport_(P641)_only.
--- Jura 05:01, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Computer gaming

How to use this property for esports (Q300920)? Especially when specific game should be indicated. I am using sport (P641) esports (Q300920) + sports discipline competed in (P2416) StarCraft (Q290106) for example. Any objections? --Infovarius (talk) 15:24, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

The latter would violate constraints. In my opinion it would be a better and much cleaner approach not to link to the game item directly, but to make specific items for each game that is played as eSport, and which subclass the sport discipline item in order to comply with the constraints of P2416. Apart from that detail, your approach looks good. —MisterSynergy (talk) 15:44, 23 January 2018 (UTC)