The Freebase Blog

Our current ethnicity data mob is going strong. Here are a few of the highlights so far:

The largest ethnicities currently recorded in Freebase are:

• African American (399 people)
• Scottish people (380 people)
• Korean people (277 people)
• Indigenous Australians (212 people)
• Acadian (107 people)

Some of the less common ones are Russian, Cherokee, Puerto Rican, Korean American, German American, Irish American, Cuban American, Vietnamese Canadian, English American, Columbian American, British Yemeni, Chinese, Rhodesli, Indian-Canadian, and Hillbilly — all with a single person each.

Shout-outs to the following contributors:

• krsalis is king of the data mob, having added information about a large number of ethnic groups from Indonesia and the Philippines, like the Dayak, Minangkabau, and Igorot people. (Check out the list of sub-groups under Indonesian people!)
• New member evening (welcome!) has listed a number of Roma people — more commonly known as “gypsies”.
• kneunert imported a list of Bavarians, of whom there are a total of 6.4 million in the world.
• zenkat is expanding the way we define ethnicity with entries like Texan, Hillbilly, WASP, and Euromutt.

Did you know?

• The people known as Eskimos are actually members of two main sub-groups, the Yupik and the Inuit. (Wikipedia has some interesting notes on when and where the term “Eskimo” is considered pejorative.)
• Freebase has co-types for American Indian groups, Canadian aboriginal groups, and Chinese ethnic groups. These exist to provide expected types for properties on US Indian reservations, Canadian Indian reserves, and Chinese autonomous regions, prefectures, and counties — all in the Location domain.
• In France, data on ethnicity is not collected in the census, and the government is prohibited from collecting such data. However, the current government is trying to have these laws repealed. There is some interesting discussion of French people as an ethnicity and/or nationality in the comments on our previous post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under data mob. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.