About & method
Rugbydex is a card catalogue of every rugby player who exists as an item in Wikidata: union, league and sevens, men and women, from the 19th century to squads named this week. It is a browsing tool for open data, not an official register — every number below is what Wikidata actually records.
The catalogue in numbers
- Players
- 49,465
- Teams
- 1,928
- Countries
- 106
- Positions
- 14
- Union
- 27,567
- League
- 21,713
- Sevens
- 185
- Women
- 2,745
Field coverage
Wikidata is patchy: it holds a date of birth for almost every player, a club list for about half, and a position for about a third. The filters reflect that — a position filter stacked on a team filter will often return nothing.
Source
- All records come from Wikidata (CC0, no attribution required — given anyway).
- Queried through the QLever Wikidata mirror (qlever.dev/api/wikidata), which answers whole-class queries in under a second where the public endpoint would time out.
- Players are the items whose occupation (P106) is rugby union player (Q14089670), rugby league player (Q14373094) or rugby sevens player (Q26237722).
- Teams come from member of sports team (P54) with start (P580) and end (P582) dates; positions from position played on team / speciality (P413), mapped onto the canonical rugby position names; plus date of birth (P569), height (P2048), mass (P2067), image (P18), country of citizenship (P27) and place of birth (P19).
- Photos are hot-linked from Wikimedia Commons via Special:FilePath, thumbnailed to 420 px. Each photo stays under the licence of its Commons page.
- Snapshot generated Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:36:26 GMT.
What it does not have
- No caps, points or match statistics. Wikidata does not carry career stats; that data lives in proprietary databases. A card shows who a player is, where they played and when — not how well.
- Squad lists are historical, not current. A club list is every stint Wikidata records; the “current” badge means a stint with no end date, which may simply be unsourced.
- Coverage is skewed towards men's internationals and towards players with Wikipedia articles; women's rugby and pre-1950 club players are underrepresented.
- Position labels are normalised onto 14 canonical positions; the raw Wikidata values (including non-rugby positions for multi-sport athletes) are dropped.
Refreshing the data
The catalogue is a single gzipped JSON snapshot, 49,465 players in about 1.9 MB. It is produced by scripts/harvest.py on the homelab build host (dev LXC): the harvest is resumable, caches each query step under data/raw/, and rebuilds the snapshot with python3 harvest.py build. Drop the new snapshot into the app's /app/data volume and the site picks it up without a rebuild.
Rugbydex is a private homelab project. Not affiliated with World Rugby, any national union, league or club. Player photos belong to their respective authors on Wikimedia Commons. Spotted a wrong card? The fix belongs upstream in Wikidata — every card links to its Wikidata item.