[Developers] Bug in the generation of the wex files

[Brian Karlak]

Hello Kavitha --

Thanks for asking about this -- it nicely illustrates how merges are  
handled within freebase.

You can check the freebase topic for any guid directly by plugging it  
straight into a URL:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000038882a7

If you do this, you will come to what appears to be a blank page.   
This is because the GUID has been merged with another topic that  
referred to the same person .  You can see the evidence for the merge  
by clicking on the "Page History" link in the upper-left:

http://www.freebase.com/view/history/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000038882a7

Midway down the list, you'll see a "Gardening Hint - Replaced By: 정지 
훈" on 2/20/2008, which indicates that this topic was merged.  (This  
merge was made because Rain was once a pseudonym for 정지훈.  You  
see the old info in the wex dump because the merge happened after the  
wex publication.)  Following that link, you'll come to the current  
article for Rain, now named by his proper Korean name:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000003b6f0fc

You will also see that 정지훈 is indeed co-typed in freebase as a  
person, a musical artist, and a company.  The "Company" co-typing is  
probably incorrect, and should be deleted (we'll do this shortly).

We keep the old GUID page around because items are never really  
deleted from freebase.  One nice side benefit of this is that you can  
explore what has happened to deleted topics -- although a nice  
enhancement might be to show a redirect to the merged page in cases  
like this.

Brian

On Mar 6, 2008, at 8:59 AM, Kavitha Srinivas wrote:

> Hello
>    Just wanted to point out that there seems to be a bug in the way
> the wex files for types are generated.  E.g., Rain (singer) maps to a
> freebase guid:
> 9202a8c04000641f80000000038882a7.  Here is a grep of all types for
> this guid from the freebase types file in wex:
>
> 9202a8c04000641f80000000038882a7        /business/company
> 9202a8c04000641f80000000038882a7        /media_common/pseudonym
> 9202a8c04000641f80000000038882a7        /people/person
>
> I checked the wikipedia entry in case it somehow defined a person who
> was both a company and a person :-), but that doesn't seem to be the
> case -- Rain is a pseudonym for a Korean singer.  BTW, I tried to
> search for Rain from the UI, I can't find it there either.  Is this
> guid somehow "irrelevant"?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Kavitha
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