From time to time, I have noticed that Wikidata records for Scottish Football teams are often wildly out of date about the manager. Sometimes an item's P286 property has only the name of someone who was briefly in charge 10+ years ago. And this for a notoriously shoogly role: for example, Hearts and Dunfermline appointed 3 managers in 2024-25 alone.

So I used a program to grab the manager / head coach name from each club's Wikipedia Infobox, then compare it with the names in the P286 property. More than half were missing from Wikidata (now fixed), which is a terrible exception rate.

Ideally a "single version of the truth" would exist for Infobox structured data, but this runs into concerns about integrating data with maintenance issues into Wikipedia. A weaker linkage running in the opposite direction could be to enhance all Wikipedia Infobox templates to define which items have a correspondence into Wikidata and trigger an update on change. Again, possibly a complexity nobody would be willing to build (especially not if hoping to master data in the opposite direction).

For now, I can set a cron task to capture changes for this particular population, which I can check and then apply when the managerial merry-go-round gets going - around September when clubs' hopes and reality really start to diverge.

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