Why be an administrator? Because you're passionate and knowledgeable about the topic area and want the best possible information to be available about it.
A type administrator has three main responsibilities:
- Defining and maintaining the types and associated topics in the domain. As an administrator, you create, edit or delete types within a domain. This means you make decisions about what properties belong in a type. Type editing typically involves some data modeling, and though we have easy-to-use GUI tools (Type editor) for this, it it important that you have some experience building types in your own domain before attempting to do it in a shared domain.
- Provide editorial oversight. You should be an avid reviewer, reading new topics and articles and making edits if/when it seems necessary. As an administrator you will also have the ability to revert changes made to a topic which means you can back out edits that are malicious or otherwise not helpful.
- Granting administrator access to other users. As an administrator, requests to become an administrator for the domain will be reviewed by you. Typically you'll want to validate that the user submitting the request has been active in the domain, has a real reason for joining, and is able to commit to being an ongoing contributor to the domain. Metaweb does not enforce any specific hierarchy or policy with respect to how administrators will work together, so it is up to you to divide responsibilities if you choose to.
Becoming a Type Administrator
Freebase doesn't currently have an automated way to submit and approve requests to be a domain administrator. For now, please use the discuss feature on a domain page to post your request. One of the current domain administrators should respond.
And guess what? You already administer a domain. As a user on the Freebase system, you already control a default domain in your own name space. It can be found by clicking the 'Types' link in the header an then on 'Types You've Created'. This is where you can begin to explore creating new types in Freebase.
