Quotation

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.: Usage of the word "Omnipotent"

2008-09-21T18:48:56.0017Z

The quotation would have been more beautiful if some other word would have been used instead of "omnipotent" which is only limited to God. God alone is omnipotent i.e., one who possesses unlimited power and can do anything.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night....: Merge the two quotations

2008-09-17T23:59:52.0017Z

Please merge the two quotes. The correct quote begins with "They who dream by day..." not "Those who dream by day". I know because I had looked it up in the source short story!

Quotation: A field to contain the quotation

2008-09-16T23:56:39.0012Z

OK, with relation to our graph database, take a look at this blog post about graphd. One of the most compelling reasons we don't use an RDBMS is that our schema is changing constantly, but that article gives some other background and explains in a lot more detail.

I'm not an American, I'm Australian, though I do work at the Metaweb office in San Francisco these days, so I hope I'm fairly sensitive to international issues, even if English is my first language. I will wholeheartedly agree that Freebase is rather US-centric at the moment and that this really needs to change if we want to involve a broader community of contributors.

There are a number of steps we need to take to support international use. I see the following as the major areas:

support internationalisation/localisation in the Freebase.com UI
- internationalise and localise the UI itself (ie. instructions, buttons, header and footer)
- make it possible for people to enter strings/names/articles in other languages
load data from outside the US, eg. foreign politicians, films, locations, etc
keep our data models international, not US-centric

I get involved in about six data modeling discussions every day and I'd say that the last point there, keeping our data models non-US-centric, is something that comes up with extreme frequency. All I can say in general terms is that the more people who stay involved in these issues, and advocate for an international point of view, the more it will occur. So please, keep raising these points!

Jeff will probably have opinions on the actual modeling for books, and I think some other people might pipe up with regard to your questions about Film. Unfortunately neither of those are my field of expertise. Perhaps you could raise the subject in each of the relevant domains?

You might also find our data-modeling mailing list to be of interest.

Quotation: A field to contain the quotation

2008-09-16T22:06:57.0012Z

OK.
So I guess I'll have to wait for the translations being exposed via a newer interface before translating quotations.

Anyway, I think you'll agree that actual works such as books and movies should be recorded as different "topics" altogether. They represent different works and there may be several of them (for instance more than one translation for the same novel).
I think LibraryThing.com had this right and I see that in this database too books translations are new entries.

But what about movies? Should localizations of movies be added as title translations only? Is that really the right choice? You Americans (assuming you are from the US) usually don't dub foreign movies (apart from some animations) but here in (most countries of) Europe there is a solid dubbing tradition. Isn't dubbing equatable to books translations, although almost always movies get only one "translation" per country?

I wish to know what you and the staff in general think about this.

/OT

It sounds very interesting you didn't opt for a more mainstreamed relational approach.
Is there any performance with graphs when it comes to large amounts of data like this? I'm really interested.

P.S.
You were right about we posting in very different timings. It's kinda late in the night here and now I'm leaving. I'll be posting again tomorrow.

Quotation: A field to contain the quotation

2008-09-16T16:21:26.0012Z

Yes, those are all stored on the *same* topic, the Coffee topic.

(As an aside, we don't use tables. We use a graph database, so it would be better to say they are stored as nodes connected to the "coffee" topic.)

Here's a direct link to the explore view, where you can see them: explore.

Quotation: A field to contain the quotation

2008-09-16T07:07:38.0012Z

Hi skud, thanks for the reply. Sorry for not knowing about all the translated stuff but it feels kind of hidden for the moment (as you say).

I don't really get what you say when you talk about a dev toolbar and hitting F8, so I'll ask you directly: are "Kaffee", "Kava", "Cafè" etc stored as different topics in the database or are all part of a relation with the topic "Coffee", say in a table named <TopicNames>?

Quotation: A field to contain the quotation

2008-09-15T19:53:31.0005Z

Shomoa, I see you've made a couple of comments today about strings (names, quotations, etc) in other languages. As it happens, we *can* store multiple languages for things already. Freebase's backend is inherently multilingual, and when anything is entered it is tagged with the language used. At the moment our UI only supports English, so we only use English strings here, but if you go to any topic (I like coffee for demonstration purposes) and then hit F8 for the dev toolbar and then go to "explore", you can see that we have keys for most topics in a variety of languages. Or check out this translation demo that one of our people put together. As you can see, we have lots of languages already when it comes to names for things.

The problem, of course, is exposing all this via the user interface on the website. This is a way off yet, but it is on our radar, and it's becoming increasingly important to us as we get more and more users from other parts of the world.

Quotation: A field to contain the quotation

2008-09-15T11:56:17.0018Z

I think it's better to create a specific fields to contain data representations of quotations.

The way it is now (with quotations being recorded in the titles of their entries):

it's impossible to query quotations by language,
we can't input the quotation in other forms of data (we may be eventually providing audio tracks for quotations from movies and public speeches).

So my proposal would be some like

Text version: String, Language

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco: Apparently never said by Twain

2008-07-21T22:19:29.0005Z

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp

Quotation: Quote as an alias for this type?

2008-06-10T18:31:41.0007Z

Good idea. Consider it done.

Quotation: Quote as an alias for this type?

2008-06-10T01:47:25.0012Z

Seems like 'Quote' might be a good alias for the 'Quotation' type

Quotation: Fictional Character reciprocity

2007-08-20T23:02:46.0007Z

Pretty much because nobody thought of it before. At any rate, it's done now.

Quotation: Fictional Character reciprocity

2007-08-08T07:19:57.0011Z

Why don't we reciprocate fictional character quotes onto fictional character?

Quotation: legalese

2007-06-08T01:31:59.0006Z

Thanks for thinking about these legal issues - it's very important that we make sure restricted data doesn't get into Freebase. Even if a site's license allows it, we really want to be good neighbors and only use data that others have worked hard to accumulate with their explicit permission.

Given that, one source you might want to look at is http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Main_Page

We have a good collaborative relationship with Wikipedia, so I believe these are quotes that you can import with no concerns.

Thanks again for helping to build Freebase's quote repository! I agree, this could become a very exciting aspect of Freebase.

Quotation: legalese

2007-06-07T05:13:13.0006Z

On second thought, I did check a few websites' Terms of Use and it would seem that this kind of behaviour is forbidden, but I don't particularly see what's wrong since they don't "own" quotations themselves.

Quotation: legalese

2007-06-07T05:10:51.0011Z

I suppose this holds for any information really, but especially quotes...Is there something wrong with, say, going to brainyquotes.com and then adding in a few hundred quotes for some people in Freebase using the quotes on their website as a source? I have an idea in mind for a Freebase app that would really benefit from quotes and without really thinking about the legal issues, I wrote up a script to rip quotes and attribute them to someone on Freebase. After testing on the sandbox (Mohandas Gandhi now has 50+ quotations) I realized I should probably ask this before going any further.

Quotation: Who is the source?

2007-05-24T01:57:53.0006Z

I changed my opinion on this.

I added a 'spoken by fictional character' property that allows you to attribute it to both the original author and the character. In the case of Judy Garland, I would attribute the quotation to the fictional character Dorothy Gale and optionally Noel Langley (unless the line appeared in the original book, then it should be attributed to Baum.)

We will soon fix the film schema so that fictional characters are topics instead of strings. Once this is done, it will be possible to attribute the quotation to Judy Garland though her quoted fictional characters.

Quotation: Misattributions

2007-05-24T01:09:22.0006Z

I just added a property to quotations called "incorrectly attributed to" which will hold this. Have fun!

Quotation: Who is the source?

2007-05-24T01:07:03.0006Z

If it's performed, I think most people would want to see it attributed to the actor, particularly if it's not derived from another work that made the quotation famous beforehand. For example, I wouldn't attribute a Hamlet quotation to Laurence Olivier.

Quotation: Misattributions

2007-05-24T00:02:42.0005Z

I'd suggest Misattributions as a property on Quotation.

Many quotes are regularly misattributed to someone. (Einstein and Ben Franklin are two folks who perennially get credit for things others said, and there was that inspiring "Nelson Mandela" quote that made the rounds a few years back, but turned out to be from Marianne Williamson: http://skdesigns.com/internet/articles/quotes/williamson/our_deepest_fear/

Quotation: Who is the source?

2007-05-23T23:52:00.0011Z

"Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

Should we attribute this to Dorothy Gale (character)? Judy Garland (actor)? Noel Langley (film writer)? L Frank Baum (author of the book the film was based on, though the quote may or may not actually be in the novel, I'm not sure)?

I'm inclined to source it to the person (Judy Garland) who said it, not the one who wrote it. In some cases (e.g. political quotes like "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") we may only know the speaker, not the writer.

All that said...whaddaya say?