Help:P641

Help page for sport (P641) . This help page will be included in Property talk:P641. Please be careful editing it not to break the included page.

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)).