User:Jéské Couriano/sandbox2

Every now and again, on Wikipedia's help fora (WP:Teahouse, WP:Help desk, WP:IRC/wikipedia-en-help) we get a user who complains about something that is not, nor ever has been, in their Wikipedia article (usually images). This is because those users are basing their complaints off of the Knowledge Graph Google prominently displays to the right when you search a particular topic.

Why complaining about the Knowledge Graph to Wikipedia isn't helpful

First, while the Knowledge Graph does pull information from Wikipedia, it is far from the only source from which information is culled. IMDb, Wikidata, Everybodywiki, profile sites, and various other miscellaneous information databases and websites also have information from them used to put together the Knowledge Graph. As such, the Knowledge Graph cannot be taken as a summary of a Wikipedia article, especially when it comes to images and living people (per our non-free content criteria).

Second, editing a Wikipedia page rarely has any realistic impact on the Knowledge Graph. If information is culled from Wikipedia for it, it's generally the first sentence or two of the lede, which is a basic description of who/what the subject is. All other information provided is generally culled from databases and image repositories.

Third, even if the information was something on Wikipedia's end, it is generally fixed once brought to our attention/found, and Google caches its content. As such, the Knowledge Graph will not reflect any changes made to the information it checks in real-time, instead taking time for the cache to refresh.

Related issues

Wikipedia also has no control, other than noindex and nofollow flags, over what Google presents in its search results, and those flags (respectively) tell search engines to not index or not count outgoing links from those pages. This has caused issues in the past that Google has been slow to respond to (as an example, their extremely poor choice of top search results for a specific query, which was and is still returning the same results for that query months later and to this day).

So what do I do?

If you have an issue with what the Knowledge Graph shows, you need to contact Google directly. This help screen explains how to take control of a Knowledge Graph about you as well as includes a link to contact Google directly for assistance if you have a Google account already. Wikipedia and its users have very little control over what it displays and cannot help get it corrected.