I 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."
This seems to be Google SOP for big data sets like this, and for the most part it works okay. The other obvious similarity is Maps. Pull what data you can from easily available sources, and then crowdsource the details or inaccuracies.
Given that she comes across as non-technical and not knowledgeable about how these things work, I think that's quite harsh. Maybe she simply hasn't checked her listing since the article was posted.
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.