[Data-modeling] State of the commons - summary/conclusions

[Kirrily Robert]

So, having gone right through all the commonseses from A to V, here's  
what I noticed as patterns:

1) A great many domains have unresponsive admins, or just haven't seen  
love in ages.  We need people to step up and take on schema modeling,  
responding to user questions/requests, and generally keeping the  
commons alive and interesting.   Anyone can do this, provided they  
have some schema experience and knows the subject area.  See http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000b75f213 
  to learn what it means to be a commons admin.

I think it would be particularly great if we could find new admins for  
the following moribund commons domains:

American football, anime/manga, aviation, baseball, basketball,  
bicycles, biology, broadcast, celebrities, comics, conferences,  
cricket, games, geology, ice hockey, influence, martial arts, radio,  
tennis.

That said, if you are interested in any other area, do put your hand  
up!  Here's a list of all the Commons and which ones have admins from  
outside of Metaweb staff: http://experthub.freebaseapps.com/commons_admins

2) Responsiveness and follow-through.  I saw a lot of domains where  
admins weren't responding, or weren't seeing a discussion through to  
its conclusion, or weren't acting on the conclusions if they were  
reached.  We need to get better at this.

I imagine that the notification emails are going to help a lot in  
saving threads from just dying.  If you want to revive any thread, you  
can post a message now and say "Hey, did we ever do this?" and it'll  
be emailed to the domain admins.  We are continuing to improve the  
notifications so that they're more useful.  For instance, we're hoping  
to start including quoted text to show what's being replied to, so you  
have more context.

If something needs action by me, Jeff, or Bryan Cheung, and can't be  
done on the spot but actually needs to be managed a bit more, we  
usually log them in Jira under "Freebase Commons and Schema" and note  
the task in the discussion thread so you can follow it there.  Please  
feel free to log these tickets if you want, or to prompt us.  We can  
also assign Jira tickets to anyone who has an account there, and that  
includes many/most of the Freebase Experts, regular contributors, etc,  
since most of them have reported a bug at some point :)  So I'm  
wondering, should we start assigning tasks in Jira to non-staff who  
are commons admins?

3) Big picture: schema suffers bit-rot.  Badly.  We're trying to do  
something here that nobody's really done before.  I don't know any  
organisation anywhere that has schemas for *everything*, and that  
allows them to adapt and change over time.  We're learning really  
fast.  I remember when I started, people talked about Rail like it was  
"too hard".  When I got around to doing it recently, it took me an  
afternoon.  So now we look at Boats or Aircraft and realise how much  
better it could be.  It's not really the fault of the people who did  
the original model, because we didn't have the skills/techniques/ 
mental models back then.  However, it *is* a problem that people are  
designing schemas and then letting them gather dust.  We need to keep  
up with current best practice, and this means having admins who are  
engaged and active.  See point 1 :)

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
Freebase Community Director
kirrily at metaweb.com
http://freebase.com/