Someone asked me the other day “Aside from the typed data, what differentiates Freebase from Wikipedia?” The obvious answer to me is the user interface. I suppose I am a bit biased since designing the UI is my responsibility, but I really feel a good user experience is essential to achieving the goals of Freebase.

The API, while extremely powerful, is in many ways useless if we don’t have any data to access. While the core of Freebase is very techie, we’ve tried to simplify the basic concepts in the user interface so it’s easy enough for anyone to contribute. There are several key features designed to lower the bar to contributions.

Inline Input
For the most part, contributing involves a single click on the title of a list, and then typing your data in a text input box. By eliminating the page refresh and navigation usually associated with contributing on a wiki, we’ve tried to reduce any penalty for inputting data. We’ve also designed the inline input so it’s relatively easy to enter multiple entries in succession.

Autocomplete
Autocomplete works in conjunction with inline input. It’s like your web browser’s URL input bar, only instead of comparing your entry to URLs you’ve typed recently, it compares your entry to existing topics in Freebase. We created this feature to help people connect and type existing untyped topics in Freebase. No less important, we hope it will help users find and collaborate on single instances of a topic–rather duplicate topics and fill them out with scattered data.

Auto-Typing
Built into autocomplete is the ability to create a new topic on the fly if it does not already exist in Freebase. Included in that feature is the mechanism to automatically type the new topic appropriately based on where it has been created. For instance, if an actor is missing from a TV series and he’s not already in Freebase, when a user adds him to the cast list, the system will automatically type him as an actor. At the same time, it automatically creates a link on the actor’s topic page to the TV series.

We’re just getting started with the user experience, but I think the building blocks are there. As always, if there’s a feature missing or you think something should be working differently, we would love to hear your feedback.