[Commons-l] Friendliness & Lack of User Recognition

[Paul Houle]

  On 2/23/2011 9:20 PM, geni wrote:
> Problem is that this is in practice a far better fit for wikipedia
> where such lists are generated in passing than commons.
     And that's a critical insight.

     From my perspective,  wikipedia is a skeleton and commons is the 
flesh that's hanging on it.  If you want to improve the organization of 
Commons,  you've got the most incredible resource in the world to do 
that...  Wikipedia.

     Today,  Freebase and Dbpedia can be used together to form a rich 
and powerful database and ontology that describes the contents of 
Wikipedia.  A "top 100" list doesn't need to be compiled by experts or 
even by humans,  but can be produced by a largely automated process.  
For instance,  you could look for things that are typed '/people/person' 
in Freebase and then sort them in the order of how many Wikipedia 
articles and produce a list of the "top 100" people that is pretty good 
(except for the minor embarrassment that U.S. President #43 is the most 
linked person in my sample.)

     With a little work,  it should be possible to build something that 
makes lists like "Train stations in Poland that don't have pictures in 
en.wikipedia",  though it's a query that's not on my fingertips because 
my system was  built to pay attention to things that have photographs 
and ignore things that don't.

     Anyhow,  Freebase is CC-BY so there's no problem feeding data from 
it back into Wikipedia/commons.  I'll offer that data quality is a lot 
better in Freebase than dbpedia,  so anyone going down this route will 
save a lot of time by relying primarily on Freebase and using Dbpedia to 
fill gaps.