This week we’ve developed a model for Ethnicity which we hope will work for most purposes, and it’s the topic of our latest data mob.
To explain our model a little:
- If you say it’s an ethnic group, then it is. We don’t want to be prescriptive here. Ethnicity is something that’s defined by the people who live it, and we’re going to leave this wide open and let the community decide what belongs on the list.
- A person can have multiple ethnicities. The “ethnicity” property on “Person” allows multiple entries. If you’re Aleut/Peruvian/Masai, you can say so.
- Ethnicities have a phylogeny pattern, which is to say, groups contain sub-groups. We can say that “Asian-American” includes “Japanese-American”, or that “White” includes “Anglo-Australian”. This lets you work at whatever level of specificity you’re comfortable with.
For this data mob, we’d like you to choose an ethnicity, type it as such, then fill in some information about it, including people of that ethnicity. You can get a list of people from Wikipedia, or from anywhere else you like; don’t be afraid to add new people.
Here’s a short video showing you how:
(Click through to blip.tv for a larger version.)
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Woohoo!
http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000286aba
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Toby: You, Bret, and Jemaine… yeah, sounds about right ;)
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:52 am
http://www.freebase.com/tools/schema/people/ethnicity
…’French people’, ‘European’, etc… this is not Ethnicity this is nationality.
In genetics, only a few items are used ‘Caucasian’, ‘African’, ‘Asian’ … and even here, that doesn’t mean much things.
Pierre
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:58 am
Pierre, you might want to take it up with zenkat, who I see is the person who typed “French people” as an ethnicity. As I said in the post above, we’ve provided a framework for people to use in whatever way works for them. zenkat (Brian Karlak) identifies as ethnically French, and I’m personally not going to tell him he can’t. But if you have a better suggestion for how French people usually describe their ethnicity, I’m sure it would make for an interesting discussion. Perhaps post something on the French people topic?
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:12 am
Pierre, further to my last… reading through the Wikipedia entry on French people, I see:
“There is a view among many observers that France has an adherence to the ideal of a single, homogeneous national culture, supported by the absence of hyphenated identities and avoidance of the very term “ethnicity” in French discourse.”
This includes a footnote to this PDF file, on “Race, Ethnicity and National Identity in France and the United States: A Comparitive Historical Overview”. Might be worthwhile for all of us to have a read of that to better understand the various points of view.
I know as an Australian I often encounter things in Freebase that aren’t applicable in Australia or which simply rub me the wrong way because we (Australians) don’t think that way. Perhaps this is one of those situations?
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:54 am
like any concept with the intention of connecting a large number of people to each other, the concept of ethnicity is controversial. the Wikipedia entry on “Ethnic group” suggests that this controversy is in the news in France right now:
“In France, no population census includes ethnic categories, and the government is prohibited from collecting, maintaining or using ethnic population statistics. The current French government, led by Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon, has begun a legislative process to repeal this prohibition.”
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Mon Ami Pierre –
I must admit, I found myself a bit torn when filling out my ethnic heritage. My father is French immigrant of Polish decent, and my mother is a Danish immigrant who grew up in Venezuela. When growing up, our Christmas traditions were usually Danish (Christmas Eve celebrations with kliner, akavit and julehjerter on the tree), but our cusine and politics were French. I feel an affinity to the cultures of both countries, and I’m proud of my connections to both.
“European-american” is bland and generic — what do Italians and Swedes share in common, except the landmass they live on? “Caucasian” is more of a racial classification, and not even well-supported by modern genetics. I’ve called myself a “euromutt” (and typed myself on freebase as such). But none of these really capture my cultural heritage the way “French people”, “Danish people”, and “Poles” do.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:54 am
I found the wikipedia definition of “ethnicity” (or ethnic group) useful:
“An ethnic group (also called a people or an ethnicity) is a group of human beings whose members identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry. Ethnic identity is also marked by the recognition from others of a group’s distinctiveness and by common cultural, linguistic, religious, behavioral or biological traits.”
Based on this definition, I would say that “French people” and “Danish people” are both ethnicities. Each has a distinctive, shared culture and language — as well as common biological traits. (My father and I are both very proud of our Gallic noses.) And each group is certainly recognized by other groups on the European subcontinent as distinct.