Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Some facts are easy, like "capital of albania" or "population of shenzhen" or "age of clint eastwood".

But is consensus the right answer for more interesting facts? Does the consensus give the right answer for "minimum wage effect on economy" or "do firearms make us safer" or "crime rate of immigrants"?

Will Google localize their facts? For a question like "us supporting nazis in ukraine", will Russian residents get one answer while US residents get a different answer?

The old Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia had different facts for different countries. In the US edition, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, while the British version said it was Sir Joseph Swan.

As Bill Gates famously wrote[1], "The facts depend on where you are coming from".

Google Maps used to show different national borders depending on where the user was located[2], maybe it still does. Chinese users saw Arunachal Pradesh as part of China, while Indian users saw it as part of India.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120629032909/http://www.btimes...

[2] http://qz.com/224821/see-how-borders-change-on-google-maps-d...

To make matters worse, much of Google's Knowledge Graph -- their database of facts -- is taken from Wikipedia. There are many problems with this approach. Wikipedia facts are often unreliable. They are easy to vandalize. Many pages are unchanged for years because editor numbers are rapidly declining. Pages are also easy to game, both by external forces (spammers) and internal forces (bias seekers).

Wikipedia editors are now working as Google's unpaid fact checkers. It's true that people edit Wikipedia for a variety of reasons, but for many contributors the site was supposed to be a free resource: contributed to for free with the promise that the content would be free to the reader and free of advertising. Instead it is being used to further Google's profit.

    The old Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia had different
    facts for different countries. In the US edition, Thomas
    Edison invented the light bulb, while the British version
    said it was Sir Joseph Swan.

If you search for "lightbulb inventor" on Google [1] it currently shows three "lightbulb inventors": Thomas Edison, Hiram Maxim, and Joseph Swan.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=lightbulb%20inventor

Remember back in 2005 when the stories started circulating about how supposedly Fox News won a court case that legally allowed them to lie?

Regardless of whether or not that's what was decided^1, I still question people who assert that somehow there should be a law against the news lying. I suggest that any answer about a controversial subject such as the one you list, even (or perhaps especially) a consensus answer.

I don't especially accept that Google (or any company that profits from accurate information, which is basically all of them) is a better caretaker of facts than a government.

^1 http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/foxlies.asp

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