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

[Paul Mackay]

I'm still fairly new to Freebase so I'd like to ask a couple of fairly basic
questions:

Is there an existing wiki for Freebase or have there been any thoughts of
creating one? It seems like this overview of the current state of the
commons would be good information to record in a more permanent place. Also
a wiki could be a good way to record improvements that the community can
make. I'm thinking very much of the Wikipedia model here. Maybe the answer
is to use Freebase itself, but its not clear that is appropriate.

Also could some additional docs be added that describe how people in the
community can better contribute towards improving content and schemas, as
well as creating new Bases and schemas? It would be helpful to explain
different ways JIRA is used, how migrations are done when an existing schema
with related data needs changing and so on.

thanks

paul


On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Kirrily Robert <kirrily at metaweb.com> wrote:

> 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/
>
>
>
>
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