Discussions on Adding Information to a Topic
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I've just returned to Freebase after a few months absence. I've got to say that I think the removal of WYSIWYG editing for descriptions is a big mistake.
You state "WYSIWYG editing of rich text isn't supported at this time in the standard topic view in order to encourage topic editors to focus on writing brief descriptions suitable for viewing as a search result. The only formatting supported is the carriage return. More extensive information should be captured in property values, not in descriptive text."
Formatting is not the same as abstracting out information into Properties. What harm is there in a little helpful formatting (e.g. headings to break up the text into meaningful chunks?). Or hyperlinks? Or bullet points? This seems a case of a reasonable principle carried to an unreasonable extreme.
If I'm allowed to format this post, why not a Description?
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Generally the idea is not to encourage writing long articles with complex formatting since most of the data should be captured in structured properties. For instance, hyperlinks would ideally be added to the weblinks section as opposed to embedded in the description - in case someone wants to query for all the URLs linking from a topic. There might not be much harm in some other formatting like bullets, bold, italic, etc... but we're also trying to make it clear in the UI that this is a different animal than a Wiki.
That all said, we'll likely re-enable WYSIWYG for some types in the system, and if there is widespread support for re-enabling the feature, we can certainly add it in the future.
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Thanks for the response, Dan, and I'm glad to hear that you will consider re-enabling formatting if there is widespread support for it - I suspect there is, even if few people actually voice it.
As regards hyperlinks, I am not convinced by the specific argument that this decision should be driven by people wishing to query all the URLs linking from a topic. A wiki this may not be; but there will be many instances when people reading a Description would appreciate a link to some relevant site in the context of that particular part of the Description. This will - I hazard to guess - happen far more frequently than people wanting to find "all the URLs linking from a topic".
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Dan, I think you guys have created an incredible system here. Allowing for more sophisticated formatting would make the wiki obsolete (as well as most of Google as we know it). The way I see it, wether you like it or not, you guys have created a system that has the potential to become the structured repository of all human knowledge. Not only I think you will have to re-enable the WYSIWYG, but you will probably have to make it smart, so that it can extract from the rich format that a user types, as much information as possible to populate links and other properties. Thoughts?
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Thanks for the kind words. I think Wikis and Google will certainly continue to have their place! As far as WYSIWYG goes, we're probably going to explore different style views for topics in Freebase - some might allow for rich formatting of articles while others will focus more on the structured data - the question of what to show in the default Freebase topic view may become less critical as application developers create new interfaces into it.
Our data team has already begun to develop clever tools for extracting structure out of articles -- it certainly would be interesting to see if applying that to our own articles might bear useful results in the future.
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Where the description has been edited, the text may no longer significantly depend upon the wikipedia page, and so the wikipedia link should then presumably be removed. But if the wikipedia page is nevertheless about the same topic, should it then be added as a web link? Might it not be automatically added as a weblink? After all, the wikipedia page is both the source of a description of a topic, and an information source about the topic. To help users move between freebase and wikipedia, it would be useful to have a standard way in which the correspondence between a freebase topic and a wikipedia page is recorded, which does not depend upon the particular source relied on for the description text. (I expect, for example, there is a MQL query for the topic corresponding to a particular Wikpedia page title - but I haven't been able to find it)
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E.g. the [[CHIC]] article, the Description text should be chock full of links, each linking to either the Freebase article or the WP original. Without those, it's less useful than WP.
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We import the Wikipedia articles to seed Freebase with topics. We're not trying to replicate Wikipedia, though, and in fact, most of the value in Fb is in the structured data (i.e., the properties), which can include URLs. For the most part, however, those need to be entered by hand.
If you're looking at a topic you know, feel free to jump in and fill out the properties!
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I found that if I paste in a chunk of text from an HTML page into a topic Description box, then the HTML formatting (e.g. font colour) is preserved, even though Freebase does not provide controls for some of the formatting. Is there currently a mechanism for editing arbitrary HTML? Or are there plans to expand the number of formatting controls for WYSIWYG editing, or conversely to allow people who want to do to edit raw HTML?
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Its true that the functions available currently are somewhat limited. We will likely update the WYSIWYG editor to add additional controls and are also considering supporting a toggle capability between WYSIWYG and HTML. Thanks for the suggestions.
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I think it would be useful to add a feature to the editor that also allows all formatting to be eliminated. This would be very helpful in getting rid of embedded format tags when pasting content cut from a Word document, a web page, or some other source.
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I was adding data to the "The Wire" topic (http://www.freebase.com/view?id=%239202a8c04000641f80000000004312be) and when I entered the name of the creator of the show (David Simon) Freebase created a link to a topic automatically imported from Wikipedia. However, this is not the same person, it's a different David Simon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Simon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Simon_%28CEO%29
How do I correct that information? Can I simply copy the correct description from the corresponding Wikipedia article?-
Many topics (people, CDs, films, etc.) happen to share the same name. Here we are two David Simons. The idea is that when you enter data, auto-complete will prompt you with known topics in Freebase, and you can choose the one you want from the list. In this case there are two David Simons in Freebase, and the incorrect one for this context was selected. The correct topic can be chosen by examining the flyout blurb on each person, then making a selection.
You can simply correct this by 1) deleting the link to the wrong David Simon, and 2) creating a new link to the correct David Simon. Steps:
Mouse over the David Simon link you've created, click on the little triangle to the left to open the pull-down menu, and select Remove from the list of commands. This will remove the wrong David Simon from your page. Now, click on Program creator to add a new creator, and type in "David Simon". Wait for auto-complete to present you with both David Simons (among other things), and choose the correct person. That's it! -
I see now. I selected the default choice. Link corrected, thanks!
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