Discussions on Singapore

Oh hey.  I just realised your "Singaporeans" type is based on "People born here".  The ones I added are people with Singaporean nationality (or at least Wikipedia thinks so, based on its categories).  Which is the better idiomatic usage of "Singaporeans"?  I know that in Australia, where I'm from, the term "Australian" means someone of Australian nationality even if not born there.

Another thing to consider -- "Place of birth" might be given at a more detailed level than just Singapore, eg. a neighbourhood or even a hospital.  So you'd miss those people in your view.

Hi Skud,

A Singaporean is anyone who has been granted citizenship, regardless of his/her place of birth. I have fixed this with a new view. Thanks for pointing out.

I was assuming that whatever is on Wikipedia is automatically added to Freebase. Did I assume wrongly? So far I have made views that I felt were significant and describes the country. At the moment, I am still in the process of manually adding heritage sites to the base. I think some of where were not captured in the Wikis. Also, I intend to coach my mum on how to use Freebase so that she can add more information about Singapore food! :)

Freebase picks up the topics for anything in Wikipedia (that is, if they have an article in WP, we get a topic in FB) but we don't necessarily get additional information about them.  Sometimes we don't even get the information that they're a person, let alone their nationality!  So I went through the Wikipedia category pages for eg. "Singaporean TV actors" and made sure they were typed as Person and TV Actor, and that their nationality was set appropriately.  (There's rather a good presentation about how our Wikipedia imports work on our blog here, if you're interested.)

I also added all those topics to your base, so if you go to the "All N views" page (the one where you can rearrange the views), you will see on the right side a list of ways to slice and dice the results.  Should make it easy to make some interesting views!

Something which I'd love to see more of in Freebase, if you have the time/energy/inclination, is foreign cinema.  I don't know much about Singaporean film, but since there are Singaporean film actors then I assume there are films made there, some filmed on location in Singapore, and so on?  Do you know where we could find information about that?

I have just created a new view for Singapore Films. I will try to source for information about foreign movies with film locations in Singapore.

Thanks for the link. I will take a good look at the presentation later and let you know if we need a mass import from Wikipedia to build up the content here.

Hi Skud,

It's my pleasure (and duty ;)) to get this going. You guessed it right! I did learn quite a bit from the Vancouver base, and I'm still learning.

How could I forget? Eating's so much a part of Singaporean lifestyle and that has to be included. Thanks for pointing out!

I hope to recruit more Singaporeans on Freebase to contribute. I'm now located in Vancouver, so I might not necessarily have the most updated information.