If I go to a page like http://www.freebase.com/view/people/person and try to add a new person, I get an autocomplete box showing the people currently in the system. That lets me confirm that the person I want to add is not there, but what do I do at that point to add the new one? Do I need a higher level of authentication to create a new topic?
Discussions on Creating a New Topic
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If you are logged in, then at the bottom of the autocomplete list should be “Create New Topic”; selecting that, after you have typed in the complete name of the new person, should create a new person. This is how it works for any property, as well; for instance, adding “Person-Topic About Me” from your user profile page; if you are not already in the system, typing your name and selecting “Create New Person” should create a new instance of Person with that name.
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When you create a new topic, Freebase automatically capitalises the first letter of the topic name. This may be fine for many situations, but it should be something that the topic creator has some control over.
I have created a topic for the units of environmental variables. I appreciate that 'Unit' is a Metaweb system type, but I need to have a much richer set, with many specific to the environmental domain. The scientific community
in this area uses - and expects to see - units such as 'mm d-1' (to represent millimetres per day). Trying to create a topic with this name gives me 'Mm d-1', which is just wrong (it probably refers to megametres per day!).
But there seems to be no way I can switch off this behaviour, or undo it when the topic has been created.
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You can, in fact, use lower case letters in display names. After initially creating the topic, simply click on the menu next to the display name and select 'rename topic', which will allow you to specify the case any way you'd like.
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Thanks, that works, but it is a bit tedious if you have a lot to do.
There does seem to be a slight, transient bug associated with this. I have a Type called 'Environmental variable',
with a property 'Units'. When I enter an appropriate value for this property (e.g. 'mm d-1') for some
environmental variable, it is entered with the
original upper-case for the first letter, i.e. 'Mm d-1'. However, when I revisit the page, it is displayed
correctly as 'mm d-1'. So no lasting problem, but confusing when it's first entered.
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Any way for ordinary users to create a large numbers of topics in a single operation from some existing source? E.g. a csv file, where each line contains the information for one topic; or some other structured source file.
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Tools like this are, in fact, in the works. The first tool will allow you to load a list of items (from csv or any text source) to a particular type or property collection. It will allow you to reconcile the list with existing topics and create new ones where appropriate. A more advanced tool that supports creation of instances with additional nested property values is also being worked on, but that is likely further out.
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eventually there may need to be some conventions regarding what's worth creating as a topic
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I'd tend to disagree, although I definitely admit that it's too soon to answer decisively.
In a theoretical sense, I think a more interesting solution is not to limit Freebase, but to develop a reputation/network-of-trust system so that Metaweb can be filtered collectively.
Think Digg, Slashdot, etc. We can agree to disagree about what's worthy my stuff doesn't "get in your way."
As long as we are using a web browser to try to edit, it may in fact get in your way -- I noticed some things already just browsing around tonight, but I'm going to look for a better place to post about that.
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