How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

It seems the greatest value of Wikipedia is consistently as a repository of citations. The reliance of moderation or review of those citations is the question.

EDIT: I hear complaints from students all the time that they are not allowed to cite Wikipedia. I tell them no you should instead cite the Wikipedia citations. They invariably tell me how much better they do academically because of that.

It’s really unfortunate that people copy claims made in Wikipedia (often without double-checking any other source) but then don’t cite Wikipedia. Often the claims made by Wikipedia are wrong, misleading, sloppy, one-sided, etc., and this (widespread) practice helps to perpetuate those problematic claims by making it seem that other authors are independently claiming the same thing. Then when future Wikipedia editors or others look for evidence of something, they find a number of sources that seem to corroborate the claim, but under close inspection turn out to a circular chain built on flimflam; unfortunately that close inspection often never happens.

Students should be encouraged to cite Wikipedia when they found information in Wikipedia, so that when they grow up and start writing real research papers they will continue citing Wikipedia when they find information there.

Finding information somewhere and then not citing it (or citing some random other source that actually says something different) erodes the whole academic project. Any teacher who tells their students not to cite Wikipedia should be ashamed.

> What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly?

If you're looking for major/important sources to read on a topic, not just a quick way to halfway-fake a works-cited section, I've found it valuable to locate some representative, recent academic book in the field and read the author's introduction and other pre-chapter-1 material. These will often include a lot of name-dropping of what are considered major works in the field. There may also be a list of abbreviations the book will use, and those often include several major works in the field that'll come up often in the body text.

That's your list of books and papers to find and read. Repeat that technique with each of those books and papers, too, if you want to keep going deeper.

Often you can get enough off an Amazon or Google preview of a book for this to work. Plus, libraries exist, and you pull that kind of information out of several books (which can be handy—anything that appears more than once deserves special attention) in less than an hour, without checking anything out. And there's always Library Genesis, which may not have every book but probably has at least one in your interest area that can be mined in this way.

Wikipedia's sort of useful for this, at least for tracking down a first work to attack with this approach, but the problem is that many articles don't cite highly-regarded or authoritative or landmark works on the topic, so much as whatever the author(s) happened to have handy or what was easiest to find online (a whole hell of a lot of great information is still not available on the Web, even in 2022, including material in very recent books, not just pre-Web ones, or is available on the Web but only in poorly- or not-indexed-by-web-search-engines under-copyright ebooks).

The referenced article on a similar effect for scientific citations can be found below.

This isn't an entirely trivial matter, as it shows that "random" persons may be able to shape judicial and scientific narratives through wikipedia.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505

> it's hard to tell which has occurred here

I guess there's only one way to really find out :D