Government

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T19:43:18.0012Z

This topic may be poor substitutition for indicating the absense of something, but the fact that it's extremely well-used in so many situations by so many different users suggests that it serves a real purpose.

Freebase, after all, is an open data community, and the community has found a need for a "None" topic. Unless or until a better alternative is provided, this well-used topic is simply too relevant to be removed from the system.

Please keep.

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T17:33:40.0012Z

On another note... even if we deleted "None", it would keep popping up again and again as people kept trying to use it.

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T17:23:39.0012Z

I disagree with Daniel that absence of information is sufficient. However, I agree that this peculiarly polymathic poymorphic None is a poor way to indicate it. As a concrete example, on my Person topic, I have no value for the Spouse or Children properties. In one case, it is because of privacy for the other party or parties involved, and in the other, it is because of a positive lack of value. A way to concretely indicate known, negative value would definitely be useful.

None: Absence of information vs. information of absence

2008-10-03T13:51:37.0012Z

This page should be marked for deletion. It serves very little purpose. The absence of information is a sufficiant indicator that a property is empty or invalid.

Government: Politician or Employee?

2008-09-27T01:29:03.0012Z

You mean you don't have a clear answer? [checks sky to see if it is falling]

In all seriousness, I forget about the appointed aspect of the Ministers/Dept heads. It just seems strange to have a person's career not have everything in the employment history area (at least for full time positions). Ugh, I have no idea what the right thing to do is.

And I think Ministries are more Agencies than Bodies. That's where I've been sticking them, so if I'm wrong, you may hear some cursing :)

Government: Politician or Employee?

2008-09-26T22:25:16.0012Z

Yeah, that's a tricky one. Agency and ministry heads are frequently appointed positions, which could be an argument for their being typed as politicians, but pretty much everybody working under them would pretty clearly be an employee. Maybe having the appointment information on the Government Position Held CVT is a mistake, and there should be a separate type for Appointed Official (or something).

Agency vs. Body is clearer, although maybe the documentation isn't -- a body should be reserved for legislatures, oligarchic coucils (like Switzerland's executive), and the like. Agencies are, well, agencies. (I confess that I'm not sure where departments and ministries fit in this schema, however.)

Government: Politician or Employee?

2008-09-26T20:27:37.0012Z

Oops, forgot to point to the Ministry of Economy and Technology, where I did it the opposite of the Interior Minister.

Government: Politician or Employee?

2008-09-26T20:24:48.0017Z

What's the difference between Government Positions Held under Politician type and the Employment History of the Person type? The Minister of the Interior of Germany, say, fits both places. Not only am I not doing it consistently, but others aren't either. (same with Government Agency vs Body) Itwould be great if we could standardize this, at least so I do it consistently :)

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-29T04:36:25.0012Z

Hi Shaki, and welcome to Freebase. Freebase is a structured database of information about people, places, and other things like that. It's not a political forum. If you'd like to contribute structured information about President Musharraf, such as his political offices held, places lived, etc etc, that would be very welcome. However, if you want a political debate, you'll probably want to go somewhere else for it.

Choummaly Sayasone: Delete

2008-08-26T23:01:34.0017Z

Completely detyped topic, please just delete.

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:46:30.0012Z

Never mind, made a newby mistake on the filter setting.

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:41:55.0017Z

Georgia is the only state that is not listed in alphabetical order. Don't know how to fix that.

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T19:02:58.0012Z

Very nice! But please bear in mind that a "military combatant" is an armed force, not a person. Otherwise we end up with an assertion that Zachary Taylor was in command of himself at the Battle of Lake Okeechobee -- always a quality you look for in a commander, of course, but not quite what the schema was meant to represent. :)

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T19:02:58.0012Z

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-25T18:26:09.0012Z

OK, that's fine. I just wanted to make sure we wanted this by design, and it wasn't an oversight. Thanks

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:44:02.0000Z

Finally, this should work:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008ffcc10

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:44:02.0000Z

Finally, this should work:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008ffcc10

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:37:14.0000Z

Sorry, that link got screwed up. Hopefully this one works:

Filter Table View

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:37:14.0000Z

Sorry, that link got screwed up. Hopefully this one works:

Filter Table View

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:30:49.0012Z

As a good starting place to explore this information, you should take a look at the Filter Table View. Here's a view that shows all U.S. Presidents who served in the Army as Brigadiers General

To do more detailed searches to do things like aggregate the number of presidents who have served in each branch of the armed services you may want to look into MQL, the Metaweb Query Language.

Hope this gives you a good start.

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:30:49.0012Z

As a good starting place to explore this information, you should take a look at the Filter Table View. Here's a view that shows all U.S. Presidents who served in the Army as Brigadiers General

To do more detailed searches to do things like aggregate the number of presidents who have served in each branch of the armed services you may want to look into MQL, the Metaweb Query Language.

Hope this gives you a good start.

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T02:13:18.0018Z

With all the discussion about the military experience of presidential candidates, it would be valid and useful to be able to conduct a search on the rank, conflict, and length of service for presidents.

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T02:13:18.0018Z

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-25T01:11:28.0012Z

The instance of time served is a particular tenure. Any dated property like this (including band membership, places lived) should have mutiple tenure instances for discontinuous tenures. Take a look at Grover Cleveland for an example.

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-24T00:30:29.0017Z

Should the time served under "Government Office or Title" allow for non-consecutive terms? See Peter Clavelle as Mayor of Burlington Vermont.

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T23:40:12.0012Z

Yeah, I hear you. I was thinking of just an empty topic for use only with addresses. Ugly, but so is having DC missing from addresses. Maybe we should have a poll for which is worse :)

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T21:39:28.0012Z

That's going to cause some bizarreness in terms of data, since some of the data (like the properties on statistical region) apply equally to both the city and the district. To find out information about Washington, DC, users would have to know to look in two places. But I do see your point about the addresses. I'm not sure what the best solution is right now.

Washington: us_state?

2008-08-21T14:12:23.0012Z

I think we need to split this topic so we have "DC" to put as the state of a US address. (I get that it isn't a state, but it does belong in that field, just like PR.) It is odd because they are one and the same (I think?), but not sure how else to fill in addreses properly.

United Kingdom: Don't merge

2008-08-20T19:45:53.0017Z

The United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland is different then just Great Britian; it also includes Northern Ireland (and some other stuff, depending on just how you want to define your various terms). However, this article should be renamed The United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland, the correct legal name of the country.

China: Medal Count by Country

2008-08-19T17:01:42.0027Z

Here's a query to see the 2008 Olympic medal count according to Freebase.

Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2008: technically, no nomination yet

2008-08-18T15:39:32.0040Z

This is strictly true. However, it seemed a bit silly that the 2008 presidential election itself was being contested by several minor party candidates but no Republican nor Democrat, so I added the presumptives. I won’t put Obama back here, but I think he should be left as one of the contenders of the main election until or unless something really unexpected happens in Denver.

Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2008: technically, no nomination yet

2008-08-18T05:31:24.0005Z

Even though Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee, this isn't official until all delegates have cast their votes at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-16T10:49:17.0005Z

I would like all of the readers to please contribute in your comments whether President Musharraf should resign or should he be punished for his deeds and acts and thrown away from his position.

Please comment what and why ???

Brazilian Communist Party: duplicate

2008-08-15T18:33:23.0012Z

ok, thanks! :)

Brazilian Communist Party: duplicate

2008-08-15T17:43:55.0012Z

If it’s a duplicate, merge, don’t delete, especially as both carry Wikipedia equivalence keys.

Brazilian Communist Party: duplicate

2008-08-15T17:01:08.0017Z

this is a dupe of http://www.freebase.com/view/en/brazilian_communist_party

Joseph Stalin: Stalin as a military commander

2008-08-14T18:14:12.0000Z

We have types for military conflicts and commanders -- if you have information about his military career, feel free to add it to the military domain!

Joseph Stalin: Stalin as a military commander

2008-08-14T16:59:33.0017Z

The guy also commanded troops during the Russian civil war, as well as during the Russian-Polish war in early 20's.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-06T04:23:11.0012Z

Yeah, this is actually what I wanted, but didn't do a good job vocalizing. Oh well. The end result is a plus.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-06T03:59:08.0012Z

Thanks Jeff. I understand that joguinn was asking for something slightly different but I think that this might still reduce some of the manual labour associated with linking politicians to parties.

Right now, it looks like he's typing Republican Party as an Organization and adding Bob Barr to its members and then on Barr's page it shows that he's a member of an organization called the Republican Party but he also has to add the Republican Party to Bob Barr's party property as part of the Politician type.

Now that Political Party has a reverse link, all he needs to do is set Republican Party as Bob Barr's party and Barr will automatically appear on the Republican Party page as a Politician in this Party.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-06T03:38:33.0012Z

Hmm...I guess there's no easy way to differentiate between identical districts with different juristictions right now.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-05T22:03:50.0012Z

It's not the Wikipedia crawler -- it's Wikipedia itself. If there are two articles for something in Wikipedia, those will both be added to Freebase. Some of them appear not to be true duplicates, but simply provincial and federal ridings with the same name (see the two Brampton Wests: here and here; they have the same name, and appear to use the same map, but they were formed on different dates).

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-05T21:52:34.0012Z

We could do that; I had forgotten that it wasn't reciprocated. In fact, I'll go do that right now. But joguinn's question was about automatically using the party property on the election campaign type to auto-populate the party property on the politician type, which isn't possible.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-05T05:38:00.0005Z

There appear to be a lot of duplicate Political Districts - at least for Canada. Too many for me to flag them all for merge by hand. It could be a problem with the Wikipedia crawler.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-05T04:24:11.0012Z

Couldn't you get the automatic linking of political parties to politicians simply by enabling the return link for the Political Party Tenure property that is incoming from Politician?

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T18:35:59.0012Z

Alright, well thanks. I just figured I'd ask because the party pages are pretty sparse despite the fact that many politicians are identified as members of the parties.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T17:54:54.0000Z

To answer the more general question implied here: There isn't any way to auto-fill properties based the contents of other properties.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T17:08:48.0012Z

It’s kind of a fuzzy question. In some states, anyone registered with a party can run as a candidate with that party, even if they aren’t properly a member or even completely misunderstand the party’s position (such as Ken Hamidi, a Libertarian candidate in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall, who registered Libertarian believing that to be a socialist party). In other states and in many countries, the party as a group chooses its candidates, and so they are necessarily affiliated. Cross-nomination also makes things weird; very few candidates of the Liberal or Conservative parties in New York state are members of those parties, for instance.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T14:50:33.0017Z

Is there any way, besides manually adding each politician to a party's "members" properties, to link a politician to a party? For instance, I have added a lot of campaigns. It should stand to reason that if a candidate runs as a Republican, that person has at some point been a Republican.

Political party: Leadership Property

2008-06-27T22:49:24.0012Z

Good suggestion. We probably need a leadership CVT, to hold person, party, title, and dates of office. Alternately, we could add the type "Employer" as an included type, and use that instead, but I'm not sure how accurate that is -- I imagine a lot of political parties don't pay their leadership.