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.
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.