It finds that "Getting a public Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20 percent." That could mean judges are citing cases with wikipedia entries rather than similar cases without and their judicial behaviour remains the same.
Wikipedia is quite unreliable on any major legal case, controversial issue, political personality, corporate entity etc., as the relevant wikipedia pages end up being heavily manipulated by agenda-driven editors who often erase or alter the most important information.
Also the causality of the argument in the linked article seems clearly backwards anyway: it's not that "Getting a wikipedia page for your case makes it more likely to be cited", it's "More important/citable cases are more likely to have a wikipedia page". Which is sort of an obvious point.
The point of judges is that they make judgements. The citing of other law is just to try and keep some consistency between the judgements to make them predictable. In theory they could even give out inconsistent judgements and that would also be workable, it just happens that it usually means something bad is happening because judges aren't naturally more pleasant people than the horrible Mass of Humans that causes so much grief. So we want judges to put in an effort at consistency and if they are consistently using Wikipedia as a reference then it is easier for the rest of us to guess what the system is about to do.
It is easy to influence judicial opinion on a case. There are even professionals hired to do it as a full time job! We call them lawyers.
And if Wikipedia does, you can bet Google does too.
While I think the study has some major deficiencies addressed in other comments, if it was true, the alarm for me would be that Wikipedia has clearly become politically partisan in many area's and topics, including some that would intersect the law
Wikipedia is hardly a "neutral" site of just facts
Not a particularly surprising result, but it shows how much of an effect such a little thing can have, and how big of an influence for example controlling what articles published vs not published could have over time.
It isn't, that's the point of the study - not all court decisions are on wikipedia and those that are, are getting cited more. Judges, Lawyers, Clerks have access to the original decisions and court transcripts in electronic form going back decades and longer. If they're relying on whats on wikipedia - they're either doing poor research or are too lazy to write their own summations.
> "...the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts — the High Court — and mostly absent for citations by appellate courts — the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal."
Secondly, is it possible that the study designers themselves used LexisNexis to research their Wikipedia articles? The study design was based on:
> "...creating new legal Wikipedia articles to examine how they affect the legal decisions of judges. They set off by developing over 150 new Wikipedia articles on Irish Supreme Court decisions, written by law students. Half of these were randomly chosen to be uploaded online, where they could be used by judges, clerks, lawyers, and so on — the “treatment” group."
If these Wikipedia articles were based on LexisNexis research, and that same LexisNexis database was being used by judges and clerks, this would seem to introduce some major biases (making the study rather worthless in terms of measuring Wikipedia influence).
One significant outcome of giving a case a Wikipedia article described in the paper but not in the article is that the case receives an infobox visible at the top of search results for most search engines.
They said the OED definitions are based on imperfect collections of common use, and aren’t “right” or “wrong”.
They also said the OED often uses SCOTUS decisions as a source, which creates an incestuous link.
I searched for this online, but couldn't find it. Might you have a link handy? Much appreciated!
The highest dictionary in the land? https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/scotus-marriage-definition-dict...
This makes sense. I don't know anything about the legal profession but they must have their own search tools and databases? Is it not easily accessible or digitized for all levels? I don't get why it would be easier in the first place to search Google or Wikipedia.
I can totally see a scenario where a clerk needs to look something up on a Friday afternoon, the though of pulling up the proper search catalog pains them so they shortcut, googling the thing they are looking for a reading the citations on Wikipedia. If I was a law clerk I would 100% do this.
it's scary excel sheets and a lot of ducttape
hell I wouldn't be surprised if the next round of innovation will be born out of tech people going into gov and realizing how much man hours there are to automate
How many elections have been shaped by 4chan, Reddit, and Facebook comments? There have been a few studies on this, eg in 2016 [0] and 2018 [1] which found results that probably will not shock you.
Personally, this might be confirmation/proximity bias, but I believe the effect of small internet communities is severely underestimated by the public and political consultants. This is an area that needs a lot more study, not so that we can stop it, but so we can raise public awareness of how memes spread and give people the tools to think critically without falling into the self-reinforcing cognitive traps that arise from filtering information with poor heuristics.
ELI5 brainwashing
Sounds like they need to put those court judgements online, or if they already are, do some SEO work so they rank. Wikipedia was a great way to do that.
I think the benefit of Wikipedia is not access to materials so much as it is the succinct summarization of the legal opinions. Perhaps now NLP could help with this, but it's a very complicated problem to provide a summary of the important bits from a 100+ page legal document.
LexisNexis and Westlaw produce succinct summaries of legal opinions. That's the basis of their value, because the legal opinions themselves are not copyrighted. They also categorize everything about an opinion so that their database is searchable by area of law, etc.
The researchers describe running an experiment on the public without opt-in consent. They also describe allowing an algorithm to do the editing. That raises questions about the kind of edits the algorithm made, how the edits influenced case outcomes, and if/how the research team will clean up Wikipedia now that they’ve concluded the study.
Are there professional guidelines that suggest how experiments like this should be conducted? Do any regulations exist to protect people who get exposed to information as a result of an experiment like this?
"Approved by the respective ethics boards of MIT and Maynooth University, the experiment amounted to a friendly stress-test of the potential vulnerability of judicial legal reasoning to the limitations of reliance on Wikipedia, notably, its ad hoc topic coverage and unknown author/editorship. The experiment featured Wikipedia entries authored by faculty and by law students under faculty supervision, who each had access, through their university library, to all the relevant primary and secondary legal materials available to judges and their clerks. This assurance of accuracy and of informed analysis in the content of the entries—though short of that offered by a specialist textbook—indicates that judges or lawyers would be unlikely to be misled by what they might read. However, as the authorship of Wikipedia articles is opaque, this fact would not be known to any legal professional when using them. From the users’ perspective, there was no particular reason to imagine that the creators of the relevant entry had any legal expertise—or even that they lacked an ulterior agenda."
I'm curious where I missed the part about the algorithm did the editing? I don't see any matches for "algo" when I control + f the article. "Algo" doesn't appear in the article either. The excerpted paragraph says who wrote the entries and it wasn't an algorithm.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4174200
Say I want to learn how to do a backflip. I do a quick search, find an instructional video, and nope the fuck out because of how dangerous and difficult it seems to perform. A prime example of knowledge that influenced my behavior.
Pointless study since this is just common sense. So much time and money is wasted in science just so that people can make a name for themselves or get a promotion.
That's not healthy at all when being used as a resource without awareness and significant caution.
I mean technically yes they are "studying" a subject but this is not a scientific experiment, but it will almost certainly be cited as such just because it's called a study.
A best-case-scenario example of influenced judicial behavior is that a judge is about to make a bad decision, but then is informed in some way by an excellent, well-referenced Wikipedia article.
But if that disqualifies Wikipedia as a "trusted source", which sources deserve that distinction?
And since the news of today is only interested in the most extreme, that's the facts you'll find on Wikipedia.
Truthfully a much worse problem is that an average user cannot edit on Wikipedia. To edit on Wikipedia you need to have an obsessive personality, to constantly guard your edits and keep other editors from removing them.
And that bias is much worse than any other, you'll find a ton of information on matters that attract obsessive personalities, and much less on more normal subjects.
Biased judges like this, love circular reasoning, to find justifications. Hence why Wikipedia is useful. Keep in mind wikipedia change the definition of a recession recently, than when challanged changed the definition of definition. Just last week.
You're really misrepresenting the case, and I doubt a good AI would rule favorably on those circumstances. The judicial system doesn't tend to go easy on stabbing defenseless people to death, even if you can argue that they were bad people or otherwise deserved it.
Warning: it's very emotional
