You know that a person is not a building, that a play is not a film, and that Glen Beck is not a reporter.  Right?

And now — with your help — Freebase can, too!

http://detypewriter.freebaseapps.com/

Written by vtalwar, (de)Typewriter is a Typewriter-style application based upon our incompatible types definitions.  On a nightly basis, we check our topics against these rules.  Topics that have incompatible types are marked and flagged for review and cleanup.

That’s where you come in.  Cleanup of topics with incompatible types isn’t necessarily straightforward.  In some cases, the incompatibility is just caused by a simple mistyping — a book was mistakenly typed as a person, or a band was mistakenly typed as an album.  These cases are easy to fix: the offending type just needs to be removed.  There are other cases, however, which are more difficult to fix — for instance, in cases in which two entities were mistakenly merged. This requires that the offending topic be split into multiple topics, which is a much more involved process.

For instance, the band “Happy Mondays” is not and never will be a /people/person, so it needs to be detyped.  However, “Bob Dylan” can be both a /people/person, and his eponymous /music/album, so it would need to be split.(*)

Once we know which case we’re dealing with, we can make the fix.  But we need your to help us figure out which case we’re looking at.   Much like the Typewriter and Genderizer apps on which it’s based, the (de)Typewriter application walks you through a list of potential incompatibilities.  But in this case, our question is phrased differently:

First off, you’ll notice that we’re not asking about a particular Freebase topic.  That’s because we already know that the Los del Rio topic may have problems.  Instead, we want to know if somewhere, out there in the big wide world, if there is a person named Los del Rio.  If there is, then we know we have some split-like cleanup to do.  If there’s isn’t, however, then we know we can automatically remove the /people/person type from the Los del Rio topic.

For each question, you’ll get some clues.  On the left panel, you’ll see the results of a wikipedia search for that name.  On the right, you’ll have Google, IMDB, or Google Maps results.  Usually the answer will be obvious from these clues — but feel free to follow links if you think more information will help.

Try not to “overthink” the questions.  If the answer isn’t obvious (or if a question and/or its supporting clues seem confusing to you), just click “Skip” to go to the next question.  You can also get extra help by clicking the “Help” button, which will give you a discussion of the type’s usage as well as letting you know which incompatible type rule spawned this question.

Finally, note that unlike Typewriter and Genderizer, (de)Typewriter uses a vote tallying mechanism.  Detyping doesn’t occur immediately after clicking a button.  Instead, votes on the separate typings are compared to determine the proper course of action.

Have fun detyping!