> It is interesting that google almost seems to take Wikipedia bio boxes as gospel
FTA, I don't believe the data was taken from a bio box:
> So it’s not too surprising that my original Wikipedia entry, as conceived by Joel, was — let’s be honest — more about my father (a famous New Jersey judge) than about me. Joel began the entry with my connection to my father, and immediately mentioned my father’s birthdate and the date of his death.
That's the scary part, as she alludes to in the next paragraph:
> If your name on Wikipedia is followed by a birth and death date, apparently those belong to you from that day forward, no matter whose dates they may be.
Don't know what is so scary about that. I am willing to bet less than 0.01% of "name[s] on Wikipedia..followed by a birth and death date" aren't the actual birth and death date.
Seems like just an oddmatch caused by an overzealous relative that happened due to the incredibly large amount of data Google processes.
You need to be much more careful in wording your bets.
I think you meant to bet that the simple solution is almost always the correct way to parse the Wikipedia article, but that's not actually what you bet. What you really bet was P(correct_parse) * P(correct_data) + (1 -P(correct_parse) ) * P(wrong_parse_accidentally_giving_correct_data) > 0.9999
A 0.01% error rate is incredibly incredibly accurate. I imagine the error rate of birthdays in Wikipedia bio boxes is higher than 0.0001. Note that, for instance, Wikipedia had a wrong birthday for Jimmy Wales. http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2007/07/on_wikipedi...
I _might_ believe that name followed by birth date and death date are the birth and death dates is the correct parsing of the Wikipedia data over 99.99% of the time. However, I doubt your proposed bet would pay off.
I would still stick by my bet as worded. For every Jimmy Wales, there are ten of thousands of people who have no odd circumstances. Combined with the much higher volume of data about recent and more verifiable people than those from a time where records were fuzzier and the fact that Wikipedia is a moving target regarding accuracy, I don't think 1 in 10,000 is unreasonable. Just the pages of every athlete competing in a major league currently would offset most anomalies.
Scary because it takes a cry to the internet to get it corrected. While the issue of being declared dead is somewhat innocuous, it could've been much worse -- what if her dad was a convicted sexual offender, and Google chose to associate that with her bio? What do you think that'd do for any job prospects, especially if she wasn't aware that it was present? It could be downright devastating.
Since it is not opt-in (nor is it opt-out), YOU have no control of it. As the author stated, she requested many times, over several months, to have it reviewed and it wasn't until she clamored about it publicly that it was addressed. What if Google never did correct it?
FTA, I don't believe the data was taken from a bio box:
> So it’s not too surprising that my original Wikipedia entry, as conceived by Joel, was — let’s be honest — more about my father (a famous New Jersey judge) than about me. Joel began the entry with my connection to my father, and immediately mentioned my father’s birthdate and the date of his death.
That's the scary part, as she alludes to in the next paragraph:
> If your name on Wikipedia is followed by a birth and death date, apparently those belong to you from that day forward, no matter whose dates they may be.