[Data-modeling] Community (repost)

[spencer kelly]

The freebase system is what engineers have been trying to build for a
very long time. A system of general knowledge that actually works-
allows formal organization of any concept. It is apparent that the
semantic web is going to effect my children and that until someone
makes a perfect language-understanding system, (god?,) its content
will be user-contributed. Thus the value of what we're doing may well
be difficult/impossible to grasp. I encourage us all to realize that
Metaweb's input system, though clever and beautiful, is only a java
app, one of many, and the community - our collaboration of crazy,
sometimes unrelated-seeming data is what is actually happening- what
can be said to have been real non-nerd value.

Granted that we are a group of  people whose collaboration may well
have historic value, one is compelled to identify the obstacles that
the community faces, whose motives are not totally parallel to
universal long-term super-knowledge.

I'm speaking about locked types- that a type I make will not be
developed in structure by anyone but me- and whose format is limited
by my particular effort and understanding.

Indeed the whole point of freebase is to develop a collaborative
network, and this has been achieved in every ounce on the technology
side, but how often have you run into duplicate types, or tried to
reciprocate a type whose creator has vanished and hasn't logged in for
months? What will happen when we all die? The reason for schema
lockdown is to provide stable properties for developers. Which (though
I'm prepared'o be wrong) could be achieved by freezing a freebase 1.0
and then loosening up types in our live version.  Default
zero-permission types are the most un-wiki part of the freebase, a
glaring contrast to the crowd-source model on which it has chosen to
be built. If we're not working together with types, what the hell are
we doing. really. I don't object to the promotion or the formalization
of some types (which is akin to the locking of heavy traffic articles
in wikipedia) but a default lock on the rest of our types is
over-the-top control for 1-year-old freebase, our project that has
some tectonic changes surely to do yet.

Also, its crazy that we don't have a wiki. Let me know and I'll make
one. I have a hunch there are some good queries to share. I've made
some wikipedia processing scripts php people may like. We need mass
import schemes, lots of our answered questions.

An open schema system would change the rate freebase grows and how it
feels to contribute. Lets actually do it. I don't know how to push for
freebase policy change, do you? This change would make the work done
in freebase more useful, our types stronger and more accountable, and
make the community more active and less awkward.
Please tell your thoughts on this, all you smart freebase people -