Wikidata graphs for data visualisation of endangered horse breeds in Wikipedia – Diff

Hello, I’m Tsaag Valren, and those who know me will have seen my username on french Wikipedia articles about horse breeds. What’s less well known is that I also contribute to Wikidata to reconstruct the pedigrees of the world’s major horse breeds. I presented part of this work at the French-speaking Wikiconvention in Quebec City in 2024.

How about a little genealogical journey on horseback, taking you through France, the United States, Russia and Hungary? The French Wikipedia provides a comprehensive overview of the world’s horse breeds, from the best-known ones, such as the Thoroughbred you see at racecourses, to the lesser-known ones, such as those Canadian ponies abandoned on a sandbank in the 18th century. Whether we are talking about racehorses or ponies at risk of extinction, knowing their pedigree is extremely important for managing inbreeding in these animals and the potential genetic diseases that might result from it. In the case of small populations of animals threatened with extinction, this work is vital to the preservation of this animal heritage shared by all humanity.

So I have added a clickable link to the articles on various horse breeds on the french Wikipedia, which leads to a family tree created using the Wikidata Graph Builder. The example below is the most famous horse in Russia, the Orlov Trotter. All current Orlov Trotters are descended from the same founding stallion, Smetanka. By clicking on this link, which appears directly in the French Wikipedia article, you can visualise the lineage of this founding stallion.

A clickable blue button on the French Wikipedia article about Orlov Trotters, Tsaag Valren, CC0.

This graph is constructed using the P22 property in Wikidata, in exactly the same way as VZP10224 did with Thoroughbreds; please refer to their post for details of the method used to construct the graph :

Wikidata Graph Builder in progess — Screenshot of Wikidata Graph Builder in progress, Tsaag Valren, CC0.

Wikidata knowledge graph in progress — Wikidata knowledge graph : Smetanka lineage. Tsaag Valren, CC0.

I tested another method of visualising these datas, the classical genealogical tree, using a model that links Wikidata and Wikipedia in the article on Hungarian Shagya horses, an endangered and prestigious breed that traces its lineage back, in particular, to a Syrian stallion called… Shagya.

This time, it’s a template originally created for humans, but it works very well for horses too. As you can see, horses that already have their own article on the French Wikipedia automatically have a clickable internal link.

Wikipedia’s ‘genealogy’ template, which retrieves data from Wikidata and displays it in the form of a family tree. Tsaag Valren, CC0.

Our journey on horseback would not be complete without an example of a very large graph featuring a very large draught horse, which is currently useful for research purposes. It concerns the French Percheron breed of horse, which is notable for having been exported in large numbers to the United States. This graph took months of work to create the Wikidata items corresponding to horses recorded in paper pedigree registers dating back to 1883:

Screenshot of Wikidata Graph Builder in progress — Wikidata knowledge graph : Jean-le-Blanc lineage. Tsaag Valren, CC0.

It is available in this format and as a partial family tree via the Wikipedia article dedicated to this founding stallion, Jean-le-Blanc.

If you’re interested in animal populations, and even if horses aren’t your thing, please do feel free to reproduce this work; this data visualisation also works for wild orcas, red pandas and pangolins.