Entering Reviews, Interviews, and Other Types of Short Non-Fiction

From Freebase

Freebase has several different types to handle various types of written non-fiction. Book-length non-fiction should be treated as a Book, but any shorter-length works can be modeled using one of these types: Review, Interview, and Short Non-fiction.

Entering a Review

The Review type can be used for a review of any type of media: book, film, video game, etc.

• The name of the review topic should be the title of the review; this is sometimes the same as the title of the book being reviewed, sometimes a generic title like “On Books”, or sometimes something unique to the specific review.
• Reviewer is the name of the person or persons who wrote the review; entering a name here creates a new topic with the types reviewer and person (or adds those types to an existing topic).
  • If the review is not credited, leave the property empty.
  • If the review is credited to a non-human entity such as a company or periodical, enter that name. Since the reviewer is automatically assigned a type of person, you should edit the reviewer’s topic page and remove “person” from the list of types.
• Reviewed Work is the title of the work or works that are reviewed in the article. Since a single review column often covers more than one work, all works reviewed in the column should be listed here, rather than creating a separate review for each.
• Note that review has an included type of published work; this is because a review is almost always contained in a larger publication, such as a magazine or newspaper issue or a book. See Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical for information about how to enter information about where the review was published.

You can also enter the reviews for a specific work (book, film, etc.) from that work’s own topic page by adding the type Reviewed Work to the topic. This will add the property “Reviews Of This Work”, which will allow you to enter any reviews by following the steps above.

Entering an Interview

• The name of the interview topic should be the title of the interview as it appears in the publication in which it was printed; if there is no title, a generic one such as “Interview with X” should be used.
• The interviewer is the person or persons conducting the interview; entering a name here creates a new topic with the types interviewer and person (or adds those types to an existing topic).
  • If the interview is not credited, leave the property empty.
  • If the interview is credited to a non-human entity such as a company or periodical, enter that name. Since the interviewer is automatically assigned a type of person, you should edit the interviewer’s topic page and remove “person” from the list of types near the top of the page.
• The interviewee is the person or persons being interviewed. Any number of interviewees may be listed. Entering a name here creates a new topic with the types interviewee and person (or adds those types to an existing topic).
• Note that interview has an included type of Published Work; this is because an interview is almost always contained in a larger publication, such as a magazine or newspaper issue or a book. See Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical for information about how to enter information about where the interview was published.

Entering Other Kinds of Short, Written Non-Fiction

All other types of short non-fiction (other than scholarly articles) can be entered using the Short Non-fiction type. This includes essays, articles, introductions, etc. The difference between these modes of writing is not always clear-cut, and there are probably more different possible types of non-fiction writing than it would make sense to try to model (especially since they all have pretty much the same types of data we can collect).

• The name of the topic should be the title of the piece of non-fiction. This will ultimately mean that we have many hundreds of works of short non-fiction titled, for example, “Introduction”, which is just fine. It is important that for every new work you add, a new topic is created (unless the exact same work is already in Freebase); this will prevent works of the same title from being overlaid together as the same topic.
  • Mode of Writing is the type of work the piece is, e.g. an essay, article, introduction, etc.
  • This is an enumerated list, which helps to limit the possible number of choices, and prevents redundant types. If the mode you want does not appear on the list, please make a request in the discussion area of the Publishing commons.
  • The subject is the subject of the work of non-fiction; it can be essentially anything.
  • Note that short non-fiction has an included type of Published Work; this is because works of this kind are almost always contained in a larger publications, such as magazine or newspaper issues or books. See Entering the Contents of a Book or Periodical for information about how to enter information about where the piece has been published.