How WikiPedia and Google can fight against vandalism?

I wanted to find some information about Marissa Mayer and what could be better option than searching on Google? But I got amazed when the saw something unbelievable in Google Knowledge Graph. It says “Marissa Ann Mayer is the current president and CEO of KD Interactive since August 2014.”. She recently completed 2 years as CEO of Yahoo! Inc.. When did she move to KD Interactive? WTF is KD Interactive?

Screenshot of Google Knowledge Graph displaying Marissa Mayer

WikiPedia is perhaps the quickest source of knowledge. Anyone, even your neighbour’s dog or a monkey in the jungle can edit WikiPedia. So, someone had vandalised the information on the WikiPedia page about Marissa Mayer. And Google was too quick to index WikiPedia and update its Knowledge Graph.

As anyone can edit WikiPedia, I undid those couple of vandalisms. But this incident raises some questions. Open Source software can be contributed by anyone. But the community takes care so that no one can harm the software. Similarly, the community of WikiPedia should be stronger to act again vandalism. And Google should get some intelligence, instead of blindly copying content for knowledge. Knowledge can’t be gained by just copying something. You need to understand it.


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