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When to Use the Inappropriate Content Flag
Freebase is open to all kinds of user-contributed content, from discussions of the most esoteric aspects of schema and property creation to topics about your favorite bands. Occasionally, however, something may come up that other community members feel is inappropriate. We have some very basic guidelines to consider if you’re wondering if your contribution, or one made by someone else, is appropriate for Freebase.
Our main guideline is that all contributions should engage with Freebase's primary goal of providing a structured database of the world's information, and engaging with the Freebase community around that goal and the information in Freebase. We don't want to limit what can go in Freebase, because openness is one of our primary tenets, but we do want to make sure that contributions recognize, and respect, our goals and those of our community members.
So what is inappropriate content? In general, we trust our community to recognize things like spam and flaming when they see it; when a discussion post in a domain about Star Trek links to an external website for Viagra, that's pretty obvious spam. If somebody posted “Trekkies must die!” in that same domain, that would be pretty obvious trolling. In both cases Freebase members could flag those posts as inappropriate, and they would be deleted. If those posters continued to create inappropriate content, their accounts would be suspended or deleted.
Commercial content is appropriate for Freebase. If someone wants to create a topic for their company or product, or a domain for their industry, that's fine. In those cases, however, we ask that they recognize our goal of providing a database of structured information by:
- Adding the company and employer types to companies
- Adding the consumer product type to any products
- Filling in properties like the company's address and founding date, where the company's products can be obtained, etc.
An excellent example of a company that has created a topic for itself is Hugg-A-Planet .
Of course we realize that not everybody starts out as a Freebase expert, so if you come across commercial content that isn't appropriately typed, or is missing property information, you could help that contributor out by adding structure and information to their topics; in many cases it may be that the user doesn't intend to create inappropriate content, they just need a little help in putting the proper structure around it.
Finally, there's offensive content. As with spam and flaming, we try to trust the judgment of our community in determining what's truly offensive content, and apply common sense, because what might be offensive to some isn't necessarily offensive to others. Some might object, for example, to a domain about German military uniforms of the Second World War because it seems to glorify Nazism, while others who collect military uniforms and insignia might view it as a valuable resource of structured information. The same could be said of a domain about the Los Angeles adult film industry; some might find it offensive, others might consider it a valuable resource for doing research. The one hard rule is that if something is illegal under the laws of the United States, where Freebase is located, like child pornography, it will be removed regardless of whether it's structured data or not.
In the end we don't want to tell you what you can't put in Freebase, because we feel that's inappropriate; instead, we want our community to shape and evolve Freebase's content according to standards we develop together. We will provide the mechanisms for you to flag content you find inappropriate, and trust you to apply our basic guidelines, and your best judgment, in doing so.
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