The European Handball Championship 2018 is just over. One of the small details that makes handball fun to watch is that you get to listen in to the coaches talking to their teams in timeouts. When I did this I realized that the German coach Christian Prokop was often addressing players by their nicknames. I was intrigued by this and - not beeing that deep into the sport - wanted to look up who is called what as some of the names were rather special (such as Bamm-Bamm).

I figured that this would be another excellent usecase for Wikidata. So I wrote the following query to get a list of people who’s occupation is handball player and their nationality is German along with their nicknames:

SELECT ?person ?personLabel ?nickname WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q13365117.
  ?person wdt:P1449 ?nickname .
  ?person wdt:P27 wd:Q183 
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

click here to edit and run

Live Results:

As so often with Wikidata no one had entered this data yet unfortunately. So I just quickly did it by checking the players’ wikipedia pages which often contained the names and added them to wikidata. Now at least 7 players have their nicknames associated with them.

Considering the entered nicknames for all players from all countries France is still in the lead with 8 players. This is easy to analyze with the following query:

SELECT ?nationalityLabel (count(*) as ?count) WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q13365117.
  ?person wdt:P1449 ?nickname .
  ?person wdt:P27 ?nationality 
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
group by ?nationalityLabel
order by desc(?count)

click here to edit and run

Live Results:

So now when the next championship comes I can just go back to the query from the beginning and easily get a list of the nicknames. A nice next step woud be to also add the information to the players stating that they were part of the team for a specific event to that you could ask Wikidata for something like: Give me the nicknames of all German players that participated in the 2018 European Handball Championship. But that is a story for another time.