AfD? Is she really notable? (daughter of a state judge seems to be her primary accomplishment; also is an English professor).
Author?
I don't think "author" counts. I've written a book but I didn't get a Wikipedia page.
Google killed me
81–90 of 99 posts
Re: Google killed me
#82Bing thinks she is dead too http://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=en-US&q=amy+wilentz
Re: Google killed me
#83I've been curious to learn how these knowledge boxes work, ever since I saw my dog Lucy show up as the star photo in a search for Rat Terrier: https://www.google.com/search?q=rat+terrier In fact, on a mobile device she's the only photo. Yes! Are these generated algorithmically? Some amount of manual curation? Or what? Of course it is humbling to discover that my dog is much more famous than I am...
Looks like Lucy is the primary exemplar picture for a rat terrier on Wikipedia? http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lucy,_a_Rat_Terrier.j... P.S. She's a cute dog!
Thanks, Matt, I certainly agree that Lucy deserves every bit of her fame. :-)
Yes, it must be the Wikipedia article. (Of course I'm the one who put her there.)
It was interesting to note that the aspect ratio of her photo fits the tall photo space in the knowledge box better that most dog photos which tend to be more horizontal.
Re: Google killed me
#84Handling death in databases of living people is a big problem. You know it's going to happen to everyone you're tracking, sooner or later. But they never seem to update their info when it does.
Re: Google killed me
#85Natural language parsing is not 100% accurate and can make mistakes - breaking news! All kinds of automated data collection such as this will have errors that need to be fixed manually by a human. This will be taken care of if/when we eventually have real artificial intelligence. The data parsing scripts Google and others use are fairly advanced, but they still break down to a couple rules and finding words in close…
Not sure if it was still the case but didn't google uses to list the extraction sources? I guess the work that was done with google squared also fed into these boxes? I get the impression then that they do use more than one source if possible.
It is a very hard one as the vast majority of the time the text features observed would indicate a date of birth/ death. I guess if the date is not in the metadata/ sidebar on Wikipedia they could flag it and hopefully find another source to correlate with.
Re: Google killed me
#86I'll point out that her Freebase entry (sourced by Wikipedia) contained exactly the incorrect data until it was fixed.
See http://www.freebase.com/m/09v5l5c?links&lang=en&hist...
Freebase, owned by Google, is part of its structured data efforts but few people remember this :)
Contributing structured data is awesome!
(former Metaweb/Freebase employee, current Googler)
Re: Google killed me
#87>It all comes down to Google’s algorithm (a word I use carelessly, and frequently, but whose meaning is obscure to me, though I feel it is something mathematical)...
It seems to me that people are comfortable not computer technology and indignant when they are forced to be aware of the details. I doubt, for instance, you would ever see this sentence:
"It all comes down to the car's engine (a word I use carelessly, and frequently, but whose meaning is obscure to me, though I feel it is probably part of the car)..."
It would be silly, on its face, to display ignorance of such a common part of the vehicle(s) that you use to get around. However, it's seen as normal to be totally disinterested in the inner workings of computers (despite their ubiquity). I'm sure this was true for cars and other pieces of technology at some point, but I don't know how long ago that was. I also don't know what caused it to change.
I feel like, if people were a little more aware of what happens "under the hood" of computing products, they would be more interested in the areas of concern for the tech community (what does company X do with my information? How well is my data protected? What limitations are built into this device?).
Re: Google killed me
#88I believe this has been fixed for a while now. It was fixed by the time I reported this over a week ago, for example. If you see an error in a Knowledge Panel (the box on the right-hand side), look for the "Feedback / More info" link at the bottom of the box and then you can click next to a fact to report a problem. People do review those reports, and that's the fastest way to report an issue.
Apologies. I posted this because it came up recently in a media blog [insert joke about media being slow]. So it was a manual fix that corrected the issue? I guess that makes since given that her Wikipedia entry didn't have the standardized birthdate listing (at least in the first line) until today ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amy_Wilentz&ol... ). Would that fix alone been enough to fix her snippet?
I'm not close enough to know what fixed it, but I agree that the non-standardized birthdate probably didn't help.
As Amy noted in her piece: "My Wikipedia entry, oddly, was put up by Cousin Joel, who has a genealogy obsession .... Joel began the entry with my connection to my father, and immediately mentioned my father’s birthdate and the date of his death."
Re: Google killed me
#89> It all comes down to Google’s algorithm (a word I use carelessly, and frequently, but whose meaning is obscure to me, though I feel it is something mathematical) Loved this. Amusing reminder of the fact that most people do not speak our language. :)
the one that startled me was "can only be corrected when Google re-indexes (whatever that means) the information that will update the search". it would never have struck me that "reindex" was an overly jargonny term, but in retrospect i guess it is.
I was struck by the same thing. The surprising thing to me was that a journalist/writer didn't figure out the nature of the process given that presumably they would understand the idea of recreating the index of a physical book.
Re: Google killed me
#90[deleted]