One of the new features released in 3.19 last night is the ability to review flagged topics. What does this mean?

Well, you’ve probably seen the option to flag topics for deletion, merge, and so on:

Topics get marked for deletion if they’re not a “thing”. Typically these are lists that got imported from Wikipedia, or articles with names like “Such-and-such a place in the 17th century”.

Topics generally get marked for merge if we somehow ended up with two topics about the same thing. For instance, we sometimes see this when we have a musical artist from Wikipedia and the same artist from MusicBrainz and the two don’t get reconciled properly at import time.

Up until now, these flagged topics have been reviewed by Metaweb staff using a tool that was only available internally. But now we’ve made this tool public, and are asking the Freebase community to help us review flagged topics. It’s an easy way to help us improve our data quality, and we hope lots of people will join in.

When you login to Freebase you should see this little box on the right hand side of the logged-in homepage.

It lists some of the topics currently up for review: in this case, a handful of merges. To get started reviewing flagged topics, click the button below. What you’ll see is a paned view like this:

It presents the two topics that have been flagged for merge, and asks you whether you think they should be merged or not. Just click the relevant button, and your vote will be recorded. If you’re not sure, click “skip” to move on to the next topic. For deletions, of course, you’ll only see a single page and the buttons will say “Delete” and “Keep”.

Reviewers’ votes are tallied daily. If a topic has at least N unanimous votes, for a smallish value of N, then a robot goes through and performs the merge or deletion. If votes are not unanimous, then the review gets escalated to an admin, who can make a final call. (The value of N has been 2 in the past, but we’re keeping an open mind about what will work for us going forward; we may find that we need to tweak it.)

There’s a help topic in Freebase with more information, including what to do in the case of more complex merges.

Please take a moment to go check this out and join our review team, and revel in your new-found powers.