[Developers] Work queues, leader boards, etc

[Iain Sproat]

game/contest -> see
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=competitive : I
think different parts of Freebase fall into collaborative, cordial or
competitive and we need to be sensitive to that.
My only hangup with the competitive aspect is that the current apps
(including leaderboards and typewriter) value quantity over quality.  I may
have made 78k facts, but a huge chunk have just been transcribed from
wikipedia, so it's a very large risk that I may just be blindly copying
wikipedia vandalism.  I'd like to see something which took into account how
many of my 'facts' were subsequently edited or removed (I'll of course
attribute poor quality of my facts as a reflection on the quality of
wikipedia articles rather than me! :-P )

Very sweet leader board app though - it makes obvious the very long tail of
contributions (26,211 of the 26,268 users have added less than 10,000 facts,
but in aggregate greatly exceed the the #1 users contribution of 330k)

Roll on crowd-sourced reconciliation!

Iain


On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:35 AM, Shawn Simister <narphorium at gmail.com>wrote:

>  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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