[Developers] Work queues, leader boards, etc

[Shawn Simister]

Tom Morris wrote:
> I think "Freebase as game/contest" is one key method of succeeding at
> the whole Web 2.0 "make money off other people's work/data" ethos, so
> I'm a little surprised that these facilities aren't more well
> developed.
>
>   
I absolutely agree with you here. Like many other Web 2.0 websites, 
Freebase started out by making its data available through an open API to 
encourage others to build applications on Freebase data and increase the 
scope of data contributors. Now they've taken it one step further in 
Acre by letting anyone with a basic understanding of Javascript to 
develop applications using Freebase data and have them hosted for on 
Metaweb's servers. I see this as a really positive step in lowering the 
barriers to more new mash-ups and therefore more people with a vested 
interest in improving the breadth and depth of Freebase data. But these 
things take time and the so far the Metaweb folks have been pretty good 
at adapting to the needs of the the community.
> Leaderboards are key to getting people to compete/work, so they should
> be shared across applications.  I don't think you care whether people
> use Typewriter or Genderizer as long as they're doing work for you, so
> points should get aggregated across all apps (perhaps weighted by
> difficulty of task).
>   
There are many reasons why people contribute to Freebase but I agree 
that for many people (myself included) a leaderboard of sorts provides 
some added motivation. I've put together a very unofficial leaderboard 
<http://leaderboard.narphorium.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/users>in Acre 
that aggregates some stats about the top contributors to Freebase. I'd 
like to be able to make base-specific leaderboards but so far I haven't 
been able to pull that type of data from Freebase.
>
> One general form of work is reconciliation (ie match this list of
> names with Freebase topics).  For the National Register of Historic
> Places data loading experiment that I'm doing, it would be great if
> instead of having to choose between only allowing exact matches or
> opting to create potentially duplicate topics, I could create a list
> of empty slots (properties) to be filled along with the a set of known
> information (name, type, etc) for each one.  Doing this in spreadsheet
> form isn't the same, because then I basically have to commit to doing
> all the reconciliation work myself, which isn't going to happen.
>   
I believe this is something that the Metaweb folks have talked about in 
relation to the spreadsheet loader that Colin and others are working on. 
Crowd-sourcing the reconciliation tasks would be a great feature to 
have. Especially if you could delegate it to base-specific queues.
> Loading simple tables is all well and good, but the real value is in
> linking stuff together, which means that more powerful mechanisms are
> needed to help encourage users to do this work.
>   
Agreed. And I think that the "game/contest" applications will be a key 
part of that effort.

Shawn
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