[Developers] Work queues, leader boards, etc

[Kirrily Robert]

On 20/02/2009, at 1:01 AM, Iain Sproat wrote:
> 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 )

If you look at /freebase/user_activity you'll see two properties,  
primitives_written and primitives_live.  The former is how many you  
simply pounded into Freebase.  The latter is how many of them are  
still there.  So for instance, if you typed something and I detyped  
it, that would increase primitives_written by one, but would leave  
primitives_live as it stood.  At least, that's my understanding of it.

(I have LOTS more to say about leader boards and recognition of user  
contributions in general, but I've been sick and now I'm off at a  
conference so I haven't had as much time as I'd like to answer a bunch  
of things on the lists this week.  Agreed re: collaborative vs  
competitive, though.  I feel like exposing the contrib counts but  
keeping them relatively low-key is a good compromise, and that the  
best thing to do is to give people better tools for collaboration and  
for recognising/noticing when other contributors near them are doing  
cool stuff, so they can join in.)

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
Freebase Community Director
kirrily at metaweb.com