Brian Karlak looked into it and told me:

We have ~600K people in Freebase with both names and genders.

I took the first name as the first space-separated token in the /type/object/name of these people. Dreadfully simplistic, I know, but it will do for this analysis. It does mean that “first names” will include such honorifics as “King”, “Princess” and “Dr.”, but that’s OK — some correlate very well with gender.

I looked for first names with at least 100 exemplars. Of those, there were 693 first names that correlated >99% with a particular gender. There were 507 that showed 100% correlation with a particular gender. Over 80% (412) of these were male names.

There were 127 first names that had at least 100 exemplars but did not correlate consistently with a single gender. The most gender-ambiguous name was Andrea (nearly 50/50 split), followed by Ashley (48/52), Dana (53/47), Nicola (47/53), and Charlie (47/53).

Brian tells me we’ll be able to use this to assert the genders of people in Freebase, so you don’t have to.

If you’re interested in gendered names in Freebase, I recently created an app to do more or less what Brian is doing above. It’s called Gendered Names and if you tell it a given name, it will tell you the split between male and female based on what’s in Freebase and present it as a nice chart. Here’s what it thinks about the name “Evelyn” for example:

Of course, as with any Acre app, you can view the source and clone it if you’d like to build something similar.

This is largely thanks to two big loads from the data team: first up, a massive import of millions of books and related information from the Open Library Project, and secondly a big load of around 255k TV episodes from TVRage.

Here’s a chart showing topic growth in Freebase since the beginning of April:

Topic growth in Freebase, April to August 2009

To take a look at the relevant data, visit our Publishing Commons or TV Commons. For some apps taking advantage of all this data, look at Tippify for book recommendations, or Alex’s TV4Me app (currently in development), a mashup of Freebase’s TV data with US broadcast schedules.

• The new Travel Commons contains information about travel destinations, tourist attractions, accommodation, and the like. Yes, you can now use Freebase to plan your next vacation!

  

• The Royalty and Nobility Commons has information about royal families, monarchs, noble ranks and titles, and the people who hold those ranks and titles. Take a look at how the Tsars of Russia died.

  

• The Medicine Commons has a new type, Notable person with medical condition to record facts like Michael J. Fox having Parkinson’s disease, or even HIV positive porn stars.

  

• The Biology commons has some new types like Fossils and Fossil sites.

  

• The Event commons is new, too, and contains information about well known events like JFK’s assassination (these were previously in the Time commons), as well as a special type for disasters. My favourite is the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.

  

That’s a lot of new stuff! If you’ve got any types of your own that you think are of broad, general interest and would like them considered for promotion, please let us know. In the meantime, have fun creating custom views with all these new types.

Some of the Commons domains were small and sparsely populated. We’ve recently undertaken to merge those small, sparse commons (commonses?) into larger, more active ones.

The changes include:

• Finance and Venture Capital are now part of the Business Commons
• Comic Books and Comic Strips have been merged together as Comics
• Dining, Distilled Spirits and Wine have been moved into the Food Commons
• Metropolitan Transit has been moved into the Transportation Commons
• Chess has been moved into the Games Commons

Note that in all cases, keys have been left behind so that existing applications will continue to work.