Wikidata’s WikiProject Video games recently passed a major milestone: 50,000 video game (Q7889) items on Wikidata. Let’s use that opportunity to draw a quick mid-year report.

Description

Let’s look at how these items are described along some basic properties − asking the Wikidata Query Service for some pretty graphs, and using my trusted inteGraality for some more advanced statistics.

Over 85% of the items have a platform (P400) statement (which does not mean that we have 85% completion on that topic, since many games are published on several platforms, and we may only have recorded one or a couple of them).

78% of the items have a publication date (P577)

67% have a genre (P136) − we have a very long tail of 600 distinct values as genres (some of which could use a clean-up, granted 🙂 )

Just above 53% have a country of origin (P495)

Just under 50% of the items have a developer (P178) or a publisher (P123).

Links to Wikipedia

77% of the items are linked to an article in at least one language-version of Wikipedia − English comes first (52%), then French (30%) and then Japanese (25%).

What I also find interesting is to look at items linked to only one Wikipedia language version: some 13% only have an article in the English-language Wikipedia, almost 10% only to Japanese-language Wikipedia, then comes French-language Wikipedia with 3% of items.

External identifiers

Over at Wikidata we link to hundreds of other video game databases.

The king here is MobyGames game ID (P1933), used on over 50% of our Q7889 items. Then come the 34% of Internet Game Database game ID (P5794), 27% of GameFAQs game ID (P4769), 20% of PCGamingWiki ID (P6337), 19% of speedrun.com game ID (P6783), 17,4% of the Media Arts Database ID (P7886), 16% of Giant Bomb ID (P5247), 15,2% of OGDB game title ID (P7564), 14,8% of Igromania ID (P6827)… and a very very long tail of sometimes highly specialized databases.

(The most represented are English-language databases, but the list above includes one Japanese, German and Russian databases)

Some caveats

1/ By the time of writing this, we already reached 50,444 items. Ah well 🙂

2/ We had actually passed the milestone of “50K games” on Wikidata before. Looking strictly at instance of (P31)=video game (Q7889) items does not tell the full story, as we have a long tail of subclasses also used as P31: some refer to distinct concepts (the 850 DLCs or 587 expansion packs), while others are indeed games (192 mobile game, 120 video game remaster, 102 browser game, 100 video game remake…)
Both raise questions on our modelling − which we shall leave for another day and another post.

3/ 50,000 is definitely something to be proud of, but is still far from the almost 300,000 entries in Mobygames, the 80,000 of GiantBomb, the 63,000 of OGDB… and as such, is indeed a milestone on the road we have ahead of us.

Link collection