Wot? No formatting of Descriptions?

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    1. May 23, 2008
      robertm says:

      I've just returned to Freebase after a few months absence.  I've got to say that I think the removal of WYSIWYG editing for descriptions is a big mistake.  

      You state "WYSIWYG editing of rich text isn't supported at this time in the standard topic view in order to encourage topic editors to focus on writing brief descriptions suitable for viewing as a search result. The only formatting supported is the carriage return. More extensive information should be captured in property values, not in descriptive text."

      Formatting is not the same as abstracting out information into Properties.   What harm is there in a little helpful formatting (e.g. headings to break up the text into meaningful chunks?).   Or hyperlinks?  Or bullet points? This seems a case of a reasonable principle carried to an unreasonable extreme.   

      If I'm allowed to format this post, why not a Description?

      2. danm
        May 23, 2008
        danm says:

        Generally the idea is not to encourage writing long articles with complex formatting since most of the data should be captured in structured properties. For instance, hyperlinks would ideally be added to the weblinks section as opposed to embedded in the description - in case someone wants to query for all the URLs linking from a topic. There might not be much harm in some other formatting like bullets, bold, italic, etc... but we're also trying to make it clear in the UI that this is a different animal than a Wiki.

        That all said, we'll likely re-enable WYSIWYG for some types in the system, and if there is widespread support for re-enabling the feature, we can certainly add it in the future.

      3. May 24, 2008
        robertm says:

        Thanks for the response, Dan, and I'm glad to hear that you will consider re-enabling formatting if there is widespread support for it - I suspect there is, even if few people actually voice it.  

        As regards hyperlinks, I am not convinced by the specific argument that this decision should be driven by people wishing to query all the URLs linking from a topic.   A wiki this may not be; but there will be many instances when people reading a Description would appreciate a link to some relevant site in the context of that particular part of the Description.   This will - I hazard to guess - happen far more frequently than people wanting to find "all the URLs linking from a topic". 

      4. balazs
        Aug 17, 2008
        balazs says:
        Dan, I think you guys have created an incredible system here.  Allowing for more sophisticated formatting would make the wiki obsolete (as well as most of Google as we know it).  The way I see it, wether you like it or not, you guys have created a system that has the potential to become the structured repository of all human knowledge.  Not only I think you will have to re-enable the WYSIWYG, but you will probably have to make it smart, so that it can extract from the rich format that a user types, as much information as possible to populate links and other properties.  Thoughts?
      5. danm
        Aug 19, 2008
        danm says:

        Thanks for the kind words. I think Wikis and Google will certainly continue to have their place! As far as WYSIWYG goes, we're probably going to explore different style views for topics in Freebase - some might allow for rich formatting of articles while others will focus more on the structured data - the question of what to show in the default Freebase topic view may become less critical as application developers create new interfaces into it.

        Our data team has already begun to develop clever tools for extracting structure out of articles -- it certainly would be interesting to see if applying that to our own articles might bear useful results in the future.


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