"It turns out I wasn't able to follow this suggestion, I filed this ticket: http://www.freebase.com..."
Be Singular
A type will contain a list of instances. For example, Type 'person' will have many instances, each one with a name. However, when viewing each person, you'll want to have it display "Joe Smith, person" not "Joe Smith, people". When you are editing a type, you are editing the 'person' type, not the 'people' type.
Be Specific...
You want to be descriptive of the collection of properties you're planning to describe -- no more, no less. One example of this is to imagine you are creating a catalog of professional baseball teams. The temptation might be to create a very broad Type called 'team'. The problem with doing this is that there may be certain properties you want to include that aren't appropriate for teams that don't play baseball. For instance, you might want a list of pitchers -- while teams in other sports might have completely different roster requirements.
... but not TOO Specific
At the same time, you don't want to confuse Types with topics. The simplest rule to apply here is if there is no more than one topic of the thing you're creating, it probably shouldn't be a type. For example, it probably doesn't make sense to create a type 'Boston Red Sox', but a type 'Baseball Team' could exist with a topic 'Boston Red Sox'.
Suggested: Be Consistent
It may also be useful to you to use the same word to begin each type you create. For instance: baseball player, baseball team, baseball league. These will all show up together on the types page and also may assist users in finding them via auto-complete. This will be mitigated a bit by the inclusion of types into a specific domain, but note that initially all of your types will be stored in an un-categorized domain in your own name space.
Also: Add Aliases
Most Freebase users are familiar with the "Also known as" property (key: alias) that every Topic has. It's an easy way to indicate that a topic is known by alternative names, and help other users find it by those names in search and autocomplete. Mark Twain , for example, is also known by his real name "Samuel Clemens", and New York, New York , is often referred to as "NYC".
But you may not be aware of the fact that you can specify aliases for your Types as well, and thus allow users to search or autocomplete on a type by any of its other names. For example, the schema of the Film Type shows that it has the more formal alias "Motion Picture" and the more casual alias "Movie". This means a user who may not be familiar with the Film type could easily find and add the correct type to a topic with the string "Movie". Cool, huh?
With over 1000 types in Freebase, and user from all over the world, it behooves you to specify any other name as an alias under which a user may look for your type. (By the way, adding aliases is not to be confused with specifying topic names in other languages.) when it comes to adding aliases to your type, consider the following possibilities:
1. Spelling
I write "theatre" you write "theater", I write "co-operate" you write "cooperate". But instead of calling the whole thing off, simply pick one as the name of your type and add the other as an alias. Now users can find it by either spelling. Problem solved. This is exactly why our Color Type has the alias "Colour".
2. Input Limitations
Many users are not familiar with inputting letters with accents using a standard keyboard. Users looking for a "Café" may type in "Cafe" instead. For this reason, if your type contains an accented character, please include a non-accented alias for user friendliness.
3. Regional/Alternative Names
Do you play ping-pong, or table tennis? Insists on swimming in an Olympic-sized pool, or love to get together with friends and shoot pool? Addicted to basketball, or oombayulu? OK, I just made the last one up, but it seems that aliases and sports are a match made in Heaven. The sport known everywhere else as "Football" is called "Soccer" in the U.S., where "Football" usually refers to "American Football". Not surprisingly, the Football Team Type in the Soccer domain is also known as "Soccer Team", uniting both domestic and international soccer/football fans.
4. Scientific/Common Names
Fido may not know that he is scientifically a "canine familiaris", but you bet your squeaky dog toy that many Freebase users do and care. Indicate scientific names whenever appropriate, and common names for the rest of us.
Aliases can also be abbreviations, historical names, etc.
