Saturday, September 01, 2012

A predictable mistake

Should you type in "Solomon Shereshevskii" as a search term into Google, you will retrieve a little biographical summary derived from Wikipedia beside the results list, with a photograph. The photo isn't Shereshevskii, it is Luria, the bloke who studied him. This kind of error is quite typical of automated systems for searching and compiling information - in the absence of genuine, reliable content being available, anything that looks like it might be the genuine article is grabbed uncritically.

No comments: