[Developers] Changing "/topic/en" to "/en".. maybe

[Alec Flett]

On Mar 19, 2008, at 1:46 PM, Tim Kientzle wrote:

> On Mar 19, 2008, at 1:37 PM, Alec Flett wrote:
>> ... it makes english names appear sooner in the id,
>> which is nice for readability. We don't think there will ever be an
>> actually domain "/en", "/fr" or whatever.
>
> So how would this extend to non-English names?
> Would there be /fr, /pt_BR, /de, /zh_TW, etc, for each
> language?  Does Freebase support arbitrary Unicode characters
> in URL paths?

You bring up a good point - there hasn't been much interest (that I'm  
aware of) of doing locale-specific language namespaces beyond the  
basics, the same way there is a 'pt.wikipedia.org' but not  
pt_BR.wikipedia.org

Personally I think "pt_BR" or something like that is unnecessarily  
cryptic in a 'id' and url space, and if anything gives the wrong  
impression - /en is shorthand for "the english language namespace  
according to the community at freebase" not "the 'en' parent language  
for the en_* locales according to some international standard"

For instance, en_US and en_UK are close enough that we can have /topic/ 
en/colour and /topic/en/color map to the same topic, but maybe /en/ 
color is the definitive name on www.freebase.com and /en/colour is the  
definitive name on www.freebase.co.uk or something.

For the purposes of mapping freebase languages to locales, 'pt' might  
ultimately map to pt_PT, and 'ptb' might ultimately map to pt_BR but I  
think it's more likely that we'll just have "pt" - afterall, wikipedia  
just has 'pt'

But then again, this is all a very english-centric opinion.

I don't want to rathole too much on all these language issues though -  
as long as the general concept of moving stuff to the root suites  
everyone, that's more what I care about.

Alec


>
>
> Would this be an actual structural change in the graph?
> That is, would the /topic namespace actually be removed
> or would low-level MQL exploration still show a /topic
> namespace containing the individual language namespaces?
>
> Tim Kientzle
>
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