Government

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-29T04:36:25.0012Z

Hi Shaki, and welcome to Freebase. Freebase is a structured database of information about people, places, and other things like that. It's not a political forum. If you'd like to contribute structured information about President Musharraf, such as his political offices held, places lived, etc etc, that would be very welcome. However, if you want a political debate, you'll probably want to go somewhere else for it.

Choummaly Sayasone: Delete

2008-08-26T23:01:34.0017Z

Completely detyped topic, please just delete.

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:46:30.0012Z

Never mind, made a newby mistake on the filter setting.

Georgia: Georgia

2008-08-26T01:41:55.0017Z

Georgia is the only state that is not listed in alphabetical order. Don't know how to fix that.

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T19:02:58.0012Z

Very nice! But please bear in mind that a "military combatant" is an armed force, not a person. Otherwise we end up with an assertion that Zachary Taylor was in command of himself at the Battle of Lake Okeechobee -- always a quality you look for in a commander, of course, but not quite what the schema was meant to represent. :)

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T19:02:58.0012Z

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-25T18:26:09.0012Z

OK, that's fine. I just wanted to make sure we wanted this by design, and it wasn't an oversight. Thanks

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:44:02.0000Z

Finally, this should work:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008ffcc10

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:44:02.0000Z

Finally, this should work:

http://www.freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000008ffcc10

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:37:14.0000Z

Sorry, that link got screwed up. Hopefully this one works:

Filter Table View

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:37:14.0000Z

Sorry, that link got screwed up. Hopefully this one works:

Filter Table View

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:30:49.0012Z

As a good starting place to explore this information, you should take a look at the Filter Table View. Here's a view that shows all U.S. Presidents who served in the Army as Brigadiers General

To do more detailed searches to do things like aggregate the number of presidents who have served in each branch of the armed services you may want to look into MQL, the Metaweb Query Language.

Hope this gives you a good start.

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T07:30:49.0012Z

As a good starting place to explore this information, you should take a look at the Filter Table View. Here's a view that shows all U.S. Presidents who served in the Army as Brigadiers General

To do more detailed searches to do things like aggregate the number of presidents who have served in each branch of the armed services you may want to look into MQL, the Metaweb Query Language.

Hope this gives you a good start.

Government: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T02:13:18.0018Z

With all the discussion about the military experience of presidential candidates, it would be valid and useful to be able to conduct a search on the rank, conflict, and length of service for presidents.

US President: Military Experience of Presidents

2008-08-25T02:13:18.0018Z

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-25T01:11:28.0012Z

The instance of time served is a particular tenure. Any dated property like this (including band membership, places lived) should have mutiple tenure instances for discontinuous tenures. Take a look at Grover Cleveland for an example.

Government: Government Office or Title

2008-08-24T00:30:29.0017Z

Should the time served under "Government Office or Title" allow for non-consecutive terms? See Peter Clavelle as Mayor of Burlington Vermont.

United Kingdom: Don't merge

2008-08-20T19:45:53.0017Z

The United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland is different then just Great Britian; it also includes Northern Ireland (and some other stuff, depending on just how you want to define your various terms). However, this article should be renamed The United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland, the correct legal name of the country.

China: Medal Count by Country

2008-08-19T17:01:42.0027Z

Here's a query to see the 2008 Olympic medal count according to Freebase.

Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2008: technically, no nomination yet

2008-08-18T15:39:32.0040Z

This is strictly true. However, it seemed a bit silly that the 2008 presidential election itself was being contested by several minor party candidates but no Republican nor Democrat, so I added the presumptives. I won’t put Obama back here, but I think he should be left as one of the contenders of the main election until or unless something really unexpected happens in Denver.

Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2008: technically, no nomination yet

2008-08-18T05:31:24.0005Z

Even though Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee, this isn't official until all delegates have cast their votes at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

Pervez Musharraf: President Musharraf

2008-08-16T10:49:17.0005Z

I would like all of the readers to please contribute in your comments whether President Musharraf should resign or should he be punished for his deeds and acts and thrown away from his position.

Please comment what and why ???

Brazilian Communist Party: duplicate

2008-08-15T18:33:23.0012Z

ok, thanks! :)

Brazilian Communist Party: duplicate

2008-08-15T17:43:55.0012Z

If it’s a duplicate, merge, don’t delete, especially as both carry Wikipedia equivalence keys.

Brazilian Communist Party: duplicate

2008-08-15T17:01:08.0017Z

this is a dupe of http://www.freebase.com/view/en/brazilian_communist_party

Joseph Stalin: Stalin as a military commander

2008-08-14T18:14:12.0000Z

We have types for military conflicts and commanders -- if you have information about his military career, feel free to add it to the military domain!

Joseph Stalin: Stalin as a military commander

2008-08-14T16:59:33.0017Z

The guy also commanded troops during the Russian civil war, as well as during the Russian-Polish war in early 20's.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Mistake in the Article

2008-08-14T16:13:59.0012Z

I agree about the alias.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Mistake in the Article

2008-08-14T14:49:07.0011Z

This is strictly correct. However, the First Secretary was functionally equivalent and was renamed back to General Secretary later. I would prefer to add First Secretary as an alias for this topic, so that the succession of leadership in the Soviet Union can easily be seen, rather than having to track between multiple offices. (It’s true that Soviet politics were Byzantine, but I think that this is a fine point to worry about.)

General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Mistake in the Article

2008-08-14T12:39:33.0005Z

The mentioning of Nikita Khruschchev is a mistake.

After Stalin, the next General Secretary was Brezhnev.

During Khruschchev's rule, position of the General Secretary replaced by First Secretary.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-06T04:23:11.0012Z

Yeah, this is actually what I wanted, but didn't do a good job vocalizing. Oh well. The end result is a plus.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-06T03:59:08.0012Z

Thanks Jeff. I understand that joguinn was asking for something slightly different but I think that this might still reduce some of the manual labour associated with linking politicians to parties.

Right now, it looks like he's typing Republican Party as an Organization and adding Bob Barr to its members and then on Barr's page it shows that he's a member of an organization called the Republican Party but he also has to add the Republican Party to Bob Barr's party property as part of the Politician type.

Now that Political Party has a reverse link, all he needs to do is set Republican Party as Bob Barr's party and Barr will automatically appear on the Republican Party page as a Politician in this Party.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-06T03:38:33.0012Z

Hmm...I guess there's no easy way to differentiate between identical districts with different juristictions right now.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-05T22:03:50.0012Z

It's not the Wikipedia crawler -- it's Wikipedia itself. If there are two articles for something in Wikipedia, those will both be added to Freebase. Some of them appear not to be true duplicates, but simply provincial and federal ridings with the same name (see the two Brampton Wests: here and here; they have the same name, and appear to use the same map, but they were formed on different dates).

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-05T21:52:34.0012Z

We could do that; I had forgotten that it wasn't reciprocated. In fact, I'll go do that right now. But joguinn's question was about automatically using the party property on the election campaign type to auto-populate the party property on the politician type, which isn't possible.

Government: Duplicate Political Districts

2008-08-05T05:38:00.0005Z

There appear to be a lot of duplicate Political Districts - at least for Canada. Too many for me to flag them all for merge by hand. It could be a problem with the Wikipedia crawler.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-08-05T04:24:11.0012Z

Couldn't you get the automatic linking of political parties to politicians simply by enabling the return link for the Political Party Tenure property that is incoming from Politician?

William M. Daley: merge

2008-07-25T06:13:48.0017Z

Sorry, I searched under Daly so didn't catch that it was a duplicate until I realized my error. Please merge.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T18:35:59.0012Z

Alright, well thanks. I just figured I'd ask because the party pages are pretty sparse despite the fact that many politicians are identified as members of the parties.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T17:54:54.0000Z

To answer the more general question implied here: There isn't any way to auto-fill properties based the contents of other properties.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T17:08:48.0012Z

It’s kind of a fuzzy question. In some states, anyone registered with a party can run as a candidate with that party, even if they aren’t properly a member or even completely misunderstand the party’s position (such as Ken Hamidi, a Libertarian candidate in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall, who registered Libertarian believing that to be a socialist party). In other states and in many countries, the party as a group chooses its candidates, and so they are necessarily affiliated. Cross-nomination also makes things weird; very few candidates of the Liberal or Conservative parties in New York state are members of those parties, for instance.

Government: Linking Politicians to Parties

2008-07-24T14:50:33.0017Z

Is there any way, besides manually adding each politician to a party's "members" properties, to link a politician to a party? For instance, I have added a lot of campaigns. It should stand to reason that if a candidate runs as a Republican, that person has at some point been a Republican.

Political party: Leadership Property

2008-06-27T22:49:24.0012Z

Good suggestion. We probably need a leadership CVT, to hold person, party, title, and dates of office. Alternately, we could add the type "Employer" as an included type, and use that instead, but I'm not sure how accurate that is -- I imagine a lot of political parties don't pay their leadership.

Political party: Leadership Property

2008-06-27T14:17:56.0012Z

Can you add a property for leadership which would point to a person?

Government Agency: Funding?

2008-06-25T20:09:46.0000Z

I think what Jeff is suggesting is right on the money, no pun intended.

Government Agency: Funding?

2008-06-24T21:21:11.0012Z

I think that a relatively simple CVT as Jeff proposes would suffice to say things like, “The FY 2007 budget of the Department of Homeland Security was G$44.9.” Sources and breakdowns could be added to that CVT later if there is real demand.

Government Agency: Funding?

2008-06-24T19:17:55.0000Z

Not to be difficult here, but most agencies (and organizations) receive "funding" from multiple sources. I would suggest "operating budget" or something else more inclusive sounding to describe how much money was available for use during a certain time period. Either that or add a "Funding source" property to the CVT if you want to be specific about funding.

Government Agency: Funding?

2008-06-24T18:18:21.0012Z

They do seem reasonable. For funding, would a simple CVT that had properties for currency, amount, and year be sufficient?

Government Agency: Funding?

2008-06-23T21:21:50.0005Z

I added a comment to the FBI page, but perhaps it is better suited here. Could a "funding" property be added to the agency? Also, how about a "number of employees" property? These both seem reasonable and necessary.

Government Agency: Suggestions for additional properties for Government Agency Type

2008-06-09T17:04:21.0000Z

Yeah, level of government is complicated. Not all countries are the same, nor are all cities. Some have metro bodies that encompass more than one locality.

I think I've always done 3 levels, and they can mean whatever it means for that country: Federal, Regional, Local:

Federal=country level only
Regional=provinces, states, cantons, administrative divisions (like Spain), or even cross-provincial entities
Local=below state regional (i.e., cities, metro agencies)

I'm not saying that is the best way to go or anything, but just an example.