True Knowledge - Blog

True Knowledge now knows about Five Million entities

A minor milestone was passed by True Knowledge early on Saturday: the number of things that we have knowledge about crossed five million.

Credit for adding the five millionth "object" to the Knowledge Base goes to user westsider29 who added [haley bogart], an American gymnast. A prize to say thank you is on the way!

On average we know 26 facts about each entity in the knowledge base so our fact total is currently just under 130 million (but growing every day).

More than half the things we know about are places of various kinds (for which we are comprehensive across the world). Other classes with hundreds of thousands of entities include people, businesses and products and we have objects identified in more than twenty thousand classes in all...

At the moment there is a strong bias in our knowledge base towards famous things: famous people and notable businesses but unlike Wikipedia (with 2.7 million topics in the English version) we have no rules restricting what we store to such things. If there is a chance that someone, somewhere will want to ask a question about something, we are very happy to accept the knowledge and because our knowledge is stored in structured form and can be maintained automatically by the system, there is no ongoing cost to retaining such information.

Do you know about something that True Knowledge doesn't? Please sign-up and teach the system about it!

Most Wanted Knowledge

There is knowledge and then there is Knowledge.  What I mean is that some pieces of information are a lot more useful than others.  The list below represents what True Knowledge users are actually asking about and not finding the answers to.

We would really appreciate some help with filling the holes in our knowledge base required to answer these questions.

1. How many legs does a centipede have?
2. What is the value of pi?
3. When was the internet invented?
4. Where does Steve Jobs live?
5. Where does Michael Jackson live?
6. What is the population of Alaska?
7. How tall is the CN Tower?
8. Who discovered penicillin?
9. What is the capital of Quebec?
10. How many eyes does a spider have?

• (to protect privacy we only reveal questions that have been asked by many different users)

If you know any of the answers and want to help out then the easiest way to contribute is to click one of the question links above (you must be logged in first).  You will be presented with the words "I don't know" and underneath this there is a link that lets you add the necessary knowledge.  You will also get the chance to try out our new ajaxy add knowledge interface which we would really appreciate some feedback on.

If you click on one of the question links above and you get an answer this means that someone else has beaten you to it and already added the necessary knowledge for that question.

A big thank you for all the help teaching True Knowledge more knowledge

Shiny new knowledge addition interfaces just went live!

Our knowledge addition interfaces allow users to add knowledge on any subject into our knowledge base which is then immediately available for our system to use to answer questions.

Although users have successfully added large quantities of useful knowledge, the number one topic of the feedback we've been receiving is how frustrating/slow/confusing etc. our knowledge addition interfaces were.  We have been listening, and today are announcing the immediate availability of our new knowledge addition interfaces.

We've tried to make them as quick, easy and generally as pleasant to use as possible, but we know we can still do better so would really appreciate all the feedback you have to offer.

Recently we passed 100,000 user added facts so we are really excited to see what users can do with these vastly improved tools.  We hope you like what we've done and thank you for helping True Knowledge grow and improve by entering so much interesting knowledge.

If you want to try out the new interfaces login here and click 'add knowledge' (or if you don't have an account you can sign-up here).