Sourcing Info On Professionals

Update from 2022 bugcat: I advise checking Wikidata first of all. It has the most detailed information. See also this resource list on WikiProject Go.

A little guide put together by bugcat in 2021.

Suppose you're looking to find out more about professional Go players. Where should you look?

Journals, magazines, newspapers, yearbooks

• Only available commercially
• Often rare and inaccessible
• Usually out of date
• Written in a variety of languages

Certain publications are exceptions to the second point. The British and Dutch Go Journals, as well as Ranka, are exceptions to both the first and second. So are certain old Oriental materials.

Associations

The Chinese Weiqi Association doesn't appear to have a website. The Nihon Ki-in, Kansai Ki-in and KBA all have good sites.

• Very up to date
• Mainly exact dates
• Always an image
• Only coverage of their own professionals, obviously
• Japanese or Korean language

GoGoD

• Only available commercially
• English language
• Unable to judge datedness, coverage and quality due to its content being paywalled

Sensei's Library

• Inconsistent coverage
• Very varied datedness, anything from bang up to date to twenty years old
• Mix of exact and inexact dates
• Occasional images
• English language

Other Go Wikis

No idea, haven't digged into them. The other (non-Wikipedia) wikis are defined by not being in English.

English Wikipedia

• Poor coverage due to its notability criteria
• Very up to date from what I've seen
• Probably poor image coverage due to requiring public domain sourcing
• English language, of course

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedia

• All three seem to have very good coverage
• Hard to judge the datedness
• Again, I would guess poor image coverage. That looked like the case in my experience.
• Chinese, Japanese, or Korean language

U-Go

• Somewhat inconsistent coverage
• Appears that all content was input in 2015-17
• Mix of exact and inexact dates
• No images
• Very complete coverage of name forms in Oriental scripts and different romanisation standards
• English language

Perfect Weiqi Database Online

• Excellent coverage of Chinese players. Not so sure about Japanese and Korean ones.
• Quite up to date, at least to the year
• Only inexact dates, but usually one for each promotion
• Almost always an image
• Chinese language (simplified characters -- watch out if searching for Japanese pros)

GoBase

Hard to say. It looked quite sparse and out of date to me, but I haven't used it much. English language.

Go4Go

Not really a professional information database at all. Some dates can be inferred from the kifu list, but the resultant assumptions are very often inaccurate. If you've found a Go4Go profile then you also get a Go Ratings one with it, since Go Ratings is based on Go4Go's kifu and even uses the same IDs.

English language.

the AGA website

A good place to find information particularly on retirements, deaths, and the exact dates and reasons for promotions, as well as other fine details.

Archived sites

GoGameGuru and the much older Mindzine can provide good information, albeit obviously out of date in many cases. Mindzine stopped being updated in 2001 and GoGameGuru in 2016.

They werere both English language sites.