Wikidata:Property proposal/level of professionalness
level of professionalness[edit]
Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Sports
| Description | level of competition generally associated with this item |
|---|---|
| Data type | Item |
| Domain | human (Q5), organization (Q43229), event (Q1656682), award (Q618779) |
| Allowed values | professional, amateur, collegiate, semi-professional, pro–am, youth |
| Example 1 | 2019 NFL season (Q60526042) → professional |
| Example 2 | Duke Blue Devils men's basketball (Q4171772) → collegiate |
| Example 3 | USL League Two (Q976491) → amateur |
| Example 4 | AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am (Q298589) → pro–am |
| Planned use | for classifying sports, competitions, awards, etc in a clear way |
| See also | competition class (P2094) |
Motivation[edit]
Right now, there doesn't seem to be a clear consistent way to classify whether a team/league/event/etc is pro, amateur, or whatever else. I deal with a lot of college sports items, and I've noticed that there's no consistent way to distinguish collegiate teams. Sometimes it gets set in the sport (P641) field (e.g. college basketball (Q48890) instead of or in addition to basketball (Q5372)), sometimes it gets set in instance of (P31) (e.g. college sports team (Q18558301), NCAA Division I women's basketball team (Q54190181)), sometimes you could follow the parent club (P831) property and find a university and college sports club (Q2367225) instance (not ideal since that's another item lookup), and sometimes there's no clear indication at all. This seems like a really basic fact that ought to be easy to determine for any sports-related item (in the same way that sport (P641) and competition class (P2094) are).
For the 6 allowed values I picked (pro/amateur/collegiate/semi-pro/pro-am/youth), my assumption is that we'd create new items for most/all of them. There are existing items that kind of work (professional (Q702269), amateur (Q455595), college sports (Q5146583), semi-professional sports (Q4371047), pro–am (Q7252932), youth sports (Q599867)). However, some of these are sports-specific, and I'd like to see this property also being used for awards/competitions/etc outside the realm of sports.
The 6 values I picked are definitely up for debate. I think this property should be limited to a fairly short list of allowed values so that it's not cumbersome to use (we have competition class (P2094) for expressing greater complexity), but exactly what's on that list may need to be tweaked. IagoQnsi (talk) 00:49, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
Discussion[edit]
Support This sounds good to me. Some other values that would make sense are "middle school," "high school," "inter-mural collegiate." Maybe "pick-up" too, but I can't think of a case where that would be used. Regarding the label, "level of professionalness" is quite clunky, but I also don't have a better a better suggestion. — The Erinaceous One 🦔 05:50, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
- @The-erinaceous-one: In the interest of keeping the list of values for this property as short as possible, I'd lean towards not adding those values. Middle/high school would fit under "youth", and intramural collegiate fits under "amateur". My concept for this property is to be extremely general, in the same vein as manner of death (P1196). More precise classifications can be accomplished with competition class (P2094). –IagoQnsi (talk) 16:38, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
Oppose; this is exactly the same problem that we are solving with competition class (P2094) (eligibility criteria to enter an event as a participant), and I think we should use that property to cover this aspect as well. I would not require and re-definition of competition class (P2094); a few new value items are sufficient actually. —MisterSynergy (talk) 09:09, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
- @MisterSynergy: We definitely could use competition class (P2094) for this, true. The reason I wanted a new property, however, is that competition class (P2094) is a somewhat complex property that allows a wide range of values, which makes it harder to do simple queries with. If you're trying to do a query for items related to collegiate sports in general (i.e. not any particular sport), for example, you'd have to either need to use a hardcoded list of all the college sports (e.g. college basketball (Q48890), college football (Q1109032), college sports (Q5146583)), or your query would have to retrieve the value item of the competition class (P2094) claim to check if it's a college sport, which is more complex and expensive. Having a separate property with a very limited set of values makes retrieval easier. –IagoQnsi (talk) 16:15, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
- Querying with competition class (P2094) is actually pretty efficient, as it is a transitive property. This means that you neither need a hardcoded list in the query, nor do you need to make complex restrictions regarding the values of P2094 to use it.
Experience shows that the proposed property will probably not be used with "a very limited set of values" even if this is the initial intention; also that edit count hunters will likely pour it to a large amount of items even if it does not fit at all (happened with P2094 as well); and that data users will not know whether to use P2094 or this one or both. Having a second "competing" property for a very similar purpose like an existing one is usually a bad idea here. —MisterSynergy (talk) 17:09, 23 September 2020 (UTC)- @MisterSynergy: Having manner of death (P1196) and cause of death (P509) seems to work okay. Much like P1196, I'm imagining this property having a one-of constraint limiting the possible values. If the constraint is widely ignored, we could have a bot enforce it by removing invalid entries. –IagoQnsi (talk) 16:38, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
- Removing "invalid entries" is an extremely tedious task and quite quickly you run into conflicts if you do so. I’d rather not rely on this option. —MisterSynergy (talk) 19:36, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
- @MisterSynergy: Having manner of death (P1196) and cause of death (P509) seems to work okay. Much like P1196, I'm imagining this property having a one-of constraint limiting the possible values. If the constraint is widely ignored, we could have a bot enforce it by removing invalid entries. –IagoQnsi (talk) 16:38, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
- Querying with competition class (P2094) is actually pretty efficient, as it is a transitive property. This means that you neither need a hardcoded list in the query, nor do you need to make complex restrictions regarding the values of P2094 to use it.
- @MisterSynergy: We definitely could use competition class (P2094) for this, true. The reason I wanted a new property, however, is that competition class (P2094) is a somewhat complex property that allows a wide range of values, which makes it harder to do simple queries with. If you're trying to do a query for items related to collegiate sports in general (i.e. not any particular sport), for example, you'd have to either need to use a hardcoded list of all the college sports (e.g. college basketball (Q48890), college football (Q1109032), college sports (Q5146583)), or your query would have to retrieve the value item of the competition class (P2094) claim to check if it's a college sport, which is more complex and expensive. Having a separate property with a very limited set of values makes retrieval easier. –IagoQnsi (talk) 16:15, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
- On second thought: Perhaps "pro-am" should be eliminated, and pro-am events should instead be classed as both "professional" and "amateur". Otherwise we might end up seeing more and more values created to specify every possible combination of the existing values. And maybe "semi-pro" should go too – it's really just a subclass of "pro". –IagoQnsi (talk) 16:43, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
- Well, "youth" does not fit here either as it is already a facet of the P2094 values, leaving "professional" and "amateur". —MisterSynergy (talk) 19:36, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
- @MisterSynergy: The idea is that every item which has P2094 should also be able to be classified under this new property (much like how every item with "cause of death" can also have "manner of death"). P2094 is where the detailed descriptor can go (i.e. "U-16 association football" or "middle school golf" or whatever), whereas this new property contains the broad category ("youth"). The goal is to enable more general queries. If you want to filter a query to only professional sports, for example, you have to dig deep into every P2094 object to figure out whether or not that item is a professional class or not. This property would make such queries much more feasible. –IagoQnsi (talk) 12:57, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
- This is clearly not a good idea. Actually, for most sport events the "level of professionalness" is no factor at all; athletes can compete regardless of their status. It appears to me that this sort of distinction is made in the US and a few other countries, but by far not everywhere in the world. It is certainly a bad idea to add it to anything that has already a P2094 if it is not a factor in most cases.
Besides that, you can already now query for something like "only professional sports" easily. Since professionalness is not yet incorporated in P2094, I use under-23 sport (Q14510042) here to demonstrate it: a query as simple as SELECT ?item WHERE { ?item wdt:P2094* wd:Q14510042 } lists you all items that have a competition class item with the Under-23 age class facet---obviously with no deep digging required. Once again, P2094 is a transitive property for exactly that reason, and adding the professionalness to it is really simple. ---MisterSynergy (talk) 13:22, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
- This is clearly not a good idea. Actually, for most sport events the "level of professionalness" is no factor at all; athletes can compete regardless of their status. It appears to me that this sort of distinction is made in the US and a few other countries, but by far not everywhere in the world. It is certainly a bad idea to add it to anything that has already a P2094 if it is not a factor in most cases.
- @MisterSynergy: The idea is that every item which has P2094 should also be able to be classified under this new property (much like how every item with "cause of death" can also have "manner of death"). P2094 is where the detailed descriptor can go (i.e. "U-16 association football" or "middle school golf" or whatever), whereas this new property contains the broad category ("youth"). The goal is to enable more general queries. If you want to filter a query to only professional sports, for example, you have to dig deep into every P2094 object to figure out whether or not that item is a professional class or not. This property would make such queries much more feasible. –IagoQnsi (talk) 12:57, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
- Well, "youth" does not fit here either as it is already a facet of the P2094 values, leaving "professional" and "amateur". —MisterSynergy (talk) 19:36, 11 October 2020 (UTC)
- Oppose As per the above discussion, I am in favor of building ou competition class (P2094) rather than having a very similar property. --Mad melone (talk) 11:21, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
Not done - Clear lack of consensus, and suggested alternative. JesseW (talk) 21:51, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
- Whoops, forgot to ping. @IagoQnsi, Mad melone, MisterSynergy, The-erinaceous-one:. JesseW (talk) 00:08, 26 March 2021 (UTC)