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

[Iain Sproat]

>
> Also a wiki could be a good way to record improvements that the community
> can make


I copied and pasted Kirrily's summary into a topic in the Todo list base.
http://www.freebase.com/edit/topic/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000c5c6ebf

<http://www.freebase.com/edit/topic/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000c5c6ebf>You
can edit the description wiki style, with the wysiwyg editor.  General chat
would still be best on this list, but it's a good way of recording the
summaries and conclusions.

Iain

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 5:23 AM, Paul Mackay <pauljmackay at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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