Creating racehorse parent-child relationship trees with Wikidata Graph Builder

Hi, I’m VZP10224. The purpose of this article is to explain Wikidata and its related tools to people who are not engineers or not involved in Wikimedia. The explanation given to visitors at the presentation at the Open-Source Conference 2024 Kyoto on July 27 was adapted from this article with slight modifications.

One of the genres of the Japanese Wikipedia articles that is excellent in terms of number of articles and content is horse racing and racehorse related. I assume that the data for writing articles is available (pedigrees, race results, critiques of race results, etc.), which makes it easier to create articles that meet the standards required by Wikipedia, and that there are fewer differences of opinion among editors. In fact, as of August 1, 2024, a total of seven articles were selected as Featured articles: four racehorses (Ogricap, Sunday Silence, Tenpoint, and Narita Bryan), one jockey (Yukio Okabe) , one race (Tennou-sho), and one racetrack (Ikegami Racecourse). In addition, 27 articles were selected for other Good articles.

Pedigree is very important for racehorses. It’s an important indicator for horse racing fans in order to hit the jackpot, and for horse owners when considering which races to run their horses to win (= win more prize money). Actually, racehorse pedigree charts are available through various means, and if they are mere data, they are not copyrighted. So, I thought that it would be possible to create a pedigree chart in the same way in Wikidata, and I referred to articles made by Eugene Ormandy (Part 1 and Part 2) and tried to make mine also using the Wikidata Graph Builder.

First, set the Japanese language,

Enter “P22” in the Traversal property. The “father” property is set.

In the Root item, enter the name of the racehorse you wish to center. In the screenshot below, you can see the word “Uma Musume,” but I’ll pass over it here (I’ll explain it later).

Anyway, press “Build” and run.

A tree has been created, starting with the word in the Root item, the racehorse tracing back to “fathers”.

When the Mode is set to “Reverse,” a tree of children with the Root at the top is not created… but a tree that can only trace back one generation of children.

Now, instead of tracing the “fathers”, let see if we can trace the “child”. Set “P40” for Traversal property.

Once executed, a tree will be created with “children” as the key.

If you do the same thing with Sunday Silence, who dominated the Japanese horse racing world as a stallion, you will have a heck of a mess. The letters can no longer be seen.

BTW, when you open the Wikidata entry for Mejiro McQueen, there is a property called “different from” and the item also has the words “Mejiro McQueen”. Click on this,

Here you see the item of the characters from “Uma Musume Pretty Derby,” glimpsed earlier. The properties that have been set up are unexpectedly extensive, even though they were not created anywhere as Wikipedia articles. I found Wikimedia Commons has a category for related photos.

Note that as of August 9, 2024, Wikidata’s entry for Mejiro McQueen (racehorse) does not have a “mother” property set. This may be due to the absence of an article on the Japanese version of Wikipedia on the mother, “Mejiro Aurora”. However, it is clear from the existence of the “Mejiro McQueen (Uma Musume)” entry mentioned earlier that there is no need to set a value in Wikidata’s properties that does not exist in Wikipedia. If you are able to submit the necessary data to Wikidata for the Mejiro Aurora, why not create it.