Beginner's Guide: Contributing to Freebase

Why contribute to Freebase?

Freebase is a free database of the world's information. By contributing to Freebase, whether it's a single piece of information or a week's work, you are contributing to the world of open data.  Open data means that people can gain knowledge and information for free, whether it's for education, personal interest, or used to form the building blocks for web applications.

We rely on contributions by people like you -- individuals with an interest in open data, or a passion for a particular topic -- to help grow the data in Freebase and keep it current. 

To learn more about Freebase, see What Is Freebase?

What belongs in Freebase?

Freebase is best at storing simple facts: a person's date of birth, a mountain's height, or a city's population.  We also store short descriptions and images.

 In general, topics are suitable for Freebase if they are of broad interest, or at least more than purely personal interest.  Our Contribution Guidelines will tell you more.

How to contribute information

 Now you're probably wondering how to contribute information to Freebase.  

 The easiest contribution you could make is to add information to an existing topic.  If you've found a topic by browsing or searching our site, you will see that it has properties associated with it.  You can click "Edit" next to any property to modify, add, or delete information.  Click "X empty fields" (where X is a number) to make empty fields visible.  See Adding information to a topic for more information.

Sometimes a topic needs to be categorised by adding types.  Types describe what sort of thing something is.  For instance, IBM is a company, San Francisco is a City/Town, Ronald Reagan is both an Actor and a Politician.  You can browse our types from the Data page to see what's available.  To add a type to a topic, simply click on "Add Type" then say what type you want to add.  Then you can edit the properties as above.  For more information, see Adding a type to a topic.

 Finally, if you find that something you're interested in is not yet in Freebase, you can add a whole new topic.  See creating a new topic to find out more.  Once you've added it, you can give it types and start filling in details.

Writing descriptions

Each topic in Freebase has a short description associated with it, or should have.  If you find one that's blank, feel free to write something.  Many of our descriptions come from Wikipedia.  You can edit these too.  Please keep descriptions short and succinct, but include the main details about the topic; we use them to help make our search more accurate, and show a snippet of them in various places throughout the site.

Uploading images

We love having images for all our topics.  You can upload images on any topic by clicking on the plus sign near the Gallery on the right hand side.  When uploading an image, make sure it is available under a suitable license such as CC-BY, or that you believe it can be used under the doctrine of Fair Use.  To understand more about licensing of images on Freebase, see our Licensing Policy.

Flag topics

 If you see a topic that's incorrect in some way, you can flag it for deletion, for merging with another topic, or perhaps mark it as offensive.  Do this by clicking on the little orange flag symbol near the topic heading at the top of the page.

Join the Freebase community

 Please take part in discussions on the Freebase website.  Every topic, type, and domain has a discussion board attached to it.

You can also keep up with what's happening in the world of Freebase by subscribing to the Freebase Blog.