iamramzan/Boxing-Champions

---

World Heavyweight Boxing Champions Dataset

This dataset contains information about world heavyweight boxing champions extracted from the Wikipedia page. It includes details such as champion names, reign periods, and title defenses.

Dataset Structure

Columns

Column Name	Description
No	The ordinal number of the champion.
Champion	Name of the heavyweight boxing champion.
Recognition	The organization or title under which the reign was recognized.
Begin_reign	The date the reign began (YYYY-MM-DD format).
End_reign	The date the reign ended (YYYY-MM-DD format).
Days	The total number of days in the reign.
Title_defenses	The number of title defenses during the reign.
Additional_recognition	Other notable details about the champion or reign.

Who are the source Data producers ?

The data is machine-generated (using web scraping) and subjected to human additional treatment.

below, I provide the script I created to scrape the data (as well as my additional treatment):

import scrapy
import re

class ChampionsSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "champions"
    start_urls = [
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_heavyweight_boxing_champions"
    ]

    def parse(self, response):
        # Locate the second table on the page
        table = response.xpath('(//table[contains(@class, "wikitable")])[2]')
        rows = table.xpath('.//tr')

        def clean_text(text):
            """Remove special characters, extra whitespace, and newlines."""
            if text:
                text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text)  # Replace multiple spaces/newlines with a single space
                text = text.strip()  # Remove leading and trailing spaces
                return text
            return None

        for row in rows[1:]:  # Skip the header row
            yield {
                "No": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[1]//text()').get()),
                "Champion": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[2]//text()').get()),
                "Recognition": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[3]//text()').get()),
                "Begin_reign": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[4]//text()').get()),
                "End_reign": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[5]//text()').get()),
                "Days": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[6]//text()').get()),
                "Title_defenses": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[7]//text()').get()),
                "Additional_recognition": clean_text(row.xpath('.//td[8]//text()').get()),
            }

Dataset Creation

• Source: Data was scraped from the Wikipedia page using a Python Scrapy script.
• Cleaning: Special characters and extra whitespace were removed to ensure a clean dataset.

Usage

This dataset can be used for:

• Sports Analysis: Analyze trends in boxing history.
• Historical Research: Study the evolution of world heavyweight boxing champions.
• Data Analysis: Perform statistical analysis on reign durations and title defenses.

License

The dataset is derived from content licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Limitations

The dataset is limited to the information available on Wikipedia as of the scraping date. Some rows might contain incomplete or approximate data due to the source material.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Wikipedia contributors for compiling the original data.

Example Row

{
  "No": "1",
  "Champion": "Bob Fitzsimmons",
  "Recognition": "World",
  "Begin_reign": "1897-03-17",
  "End_reign": "1899-06-09",
  "Days": "815",
  "Title_defenses": "2",
  "Additional_recognition": "First three-division champion"
}