Exploring Wrestling Stables

A childhood friend said Sean Waltman was doing a talk in town for £50 a ticket. That is Metallica money for a local hall, so I looked him up. Wrestling fans care a lot about who has been in a stable with who. I wanted a map of all of it.

Wikipedia has pages for stables, with members and former members. DBpedia lets you query that. A little R later I had two enormous Gephi pictures: one coloured by communities, one with dots sized by how central each wrestler was. About 3600 pixels a side. You have to click in to wander around.

I posted it on Reddit because I did not actually know enough about wrestling. They pointed out that stables and factions are not the same thing, that tag teams should be recognised teams rather than one-night tags, that I should calculate a Flair Number like Erdős, and that Ric Flair was missing. He was missing because DBpedia did not type him as a wrestler.

The data was frozen at June 2013, the member fields were patchy, and some people are listed by gimmick and some by real name. I parked the graph rather than keep patching Wikipedia’s holes, and went off to work with fans who actually knew the subject. I did not finish a complete map of wrestling. What I kept was that a giant slightly-wrong picture is a great way to start an argument with people who care. They beat the machine, then some of them went and fixed the source. That later became a whole cycle of the PhD.