How does Wikipedia influence Google Knowledge Panels?

Knowledge Panels are populated from the Knowledge Graph, which is built from a mix of structured data sources, and Wikipedia plus Wikidata are among the most heavily weighted of those sources. In practice, the article description usually becomes the basis for the panel’s short description; the article’s infobox facts (founding date, headquarters, CEO, key personnel for organizations; birth date, occupation, education for people) feed the panel’s structured fields; and the Wikidata entry that mirrors the Wikipedia article provides the machine-readable layer that lets Google connect the entity to related entities. For reputation work, this is operationally important because improving the Wikipedia article is one of the most reliable ways to improve a Knowledge Panel’s content and accuracy. Direct Knowledge Panel suggestions through Google’s interface are also available but are much slower and have lower acceptance rates than getting the underlying Wikipedia and Wikidata data right.