Sources and method
Sumo Rikishi is an English-language reference to sumo wrestlers and the stables (heya) they trained in. It has 1,453 wrestler pages and 89 stable pages. Every wrestler page gives the career facts that the sources state: highest rank, origin, dates, record and last stable.
Where the facts come from
Career figures and dates come from the SumoDB profile of each wrestler. SumoDB (Sumo Reference) is an unofficial database kept by volunteers; the date on which each profile was read is given at the bottom of the page. The last stable is SumoDB's last stable, compared with the stable lists of the Japanese Wikipedia; where the two disagree, the stable is left out. Where a wrestler's Japanese Wikipedia article is a usable second source, it is used to avoid wrong tenses and wrong scopes, for example for wrestlers who died, who also fought in Osaka sumo, or whose origin the article says was only claimed. Nothing is copied from the article: the text is our own wording. Stable pages use the Japan Sumo Association's pages and the stables' own sites first; Japanese Wikipedia is used only for history and is marked as a secondary source.
The figures are those of the September 2026 tournament and earlier. A fact that no source states is left out. When SumoDB and another source give different values, the page uses the SumoDB value. This concerns mainly weight and height, which change over a career and are recorded on different dates, and the month of a debut or a retirement. The debut month is the first tournament in which SumoDB lists the wrestler; in a comparison with about 540 official profiles of the Japan Sumo Association, the official month was one tournament later than SumoDB's in about 8 percent of the cases.
For about 540 wrestlers, most of them born after 1960, the official profile of the Japan Sumo Association was compared with the page values on 28 October 2026: the birth dates agree in every case, and the remaining differences concern mainly weight, height and the debut month, described above, plus a handful of retirement months, ranks and stables that were checked one by one. The association's profiles are used only for this check; nothing is copied from them, and the pages say where such a profile exists. For the other wrestlers, SumoDB (and the Japanese Wikipedia article where it exists) is the only source.
How the texts are made and checked
The summaries are short and factual. They were produced with the help of AI language models and scripts from the structured facts of the sources, and each text was then compared with those sources by a separate AI checker and by automatic rules. These checks found and removed errors in tense, scope, stable names and dates. They show that a text agrees with the sources named on its page; they do not verify the sources themselves, and they are not a guarantee that no error remains.
Illustrations
Every picture is an AI-generated illustration of a representative wrestler. It is not a photograph and not a likeness of the person it accompanies.