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How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

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Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#11

Post by pcrh »

mikece wrote: post #3
stevenjgarner wrote: post #2

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.

What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly? For academic research I consider the content of the page as "Yeah, maybe" but the citations to be more useful in terms of digging to deeper sources faster. The argument could be made that the ability of almost anyone to edit Wikipedia is a form of peer review but for edge topics it's tough to tell who has the chops to b…

Wikipedia may be a good start if you're completely clueless about a topic. But, academically-speaking, it doesn't last long. You're not going to be able to produce anything more insightful than a fresher's last minute sunday night essay using wikipedia.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#12

Post by corrral »

jacobolus wrote: post #9
corrral wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 na…

The most useful tool is the academic citation graph, e.g. via Google Scholar. Start with a couple keywords. Click through the "cited by n" links on the top few papers. For papers that don’t have PDFs freely available, find DOIs and put them into Sci-hub. Books can often be found at the Internet Archive, Google Books, or libgen. At the start, skim skim skim. Look at what links forward and backward from the papers you…

Thanks for the reminder—I often forget about Google's various less-prominent tools and services.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#13

Post by commoner »

This is similar to the open access citation advantage (FUTON bias):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_citation_advantage

Articles on Wikipedia and in open access journals are more accessible than paywalled sources, which means that people will read them more often.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#14

Post by Dma54rhs »

jacobolus wrote: post #4
stevenjgarner wrote: post #2

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…

It's difficult to impossible to impossible to actually fix those mistakes on Wikipedia. Its good theory only on paper without any change in real life.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#16

Post by jacobolus »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #14
jacobolus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's difficult to impossible to impossible to actually fix those mistakes on Wikipedia. Its good theory only on paper without any change in real life.

It is entirely possible to fix those mistakes (one at a time) on Wikipedia.... if you do the research work to find out what happened.

But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story.

The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into fixing, there are another 100 that nobody ever notices.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#18

Post by s1artibartfast »

jacobolus wrote: post #16
Dma54rhs wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to impossible to impossible to actually fix those mistakes on Wikipedia. Its good theory only on paper without any change in real life.

It is entirely possible to fix those mistakes (one at a time) on Wikipedia.... if you do the research work to find out what happened. But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story. The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into…

I find obvious errors all the time, but the pages are locked. This is enough of a barrier to stop me from trying to fix it.

Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#19

Post by jacobolus »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #18
jacobolus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is entirely possible to fix those mistakes (one at a time) on Wikipedia.... if you do the research work to find out what happened. But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story. The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into…

I find obvious errors all the time, but the pages are locked. This is enough of a barrier to stop me from trying to fix it. Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.

If you can’t be bothered to sign up for a free account, it’s unlikely you’ll do the (sometimes nontrivial) amount of research required to prove your case if you get in an edit war with another author.

You could equally well say “I find obvious errors in textbooks / lecture videos / journal articles / paper encyclopedias / ... all the time but it’s too hard to contact the author so I don’t do anything about it”.

The main difference is that in Wikipedia you can do something about it with some extra effort. So it’s actually a much better situation than most kinds of resources.

The pages that are “locked” are usually locked because they are spam magnets. Not allowing IP edits is unfortunate (and does discourage simple corrections to articles), but in the highest traffic parts of the site the work saved from not having to revert dozens of low-effort vandal posts is (at least arguably) worth the downside.

> overruled by partisan

You wouldn’t believe the amount of abject nonsense and spam that gets cleaned up by those “partisans”. But Wikipedia is an open project, the “partisans” here are just other (slightly more experienced) volunteers not in any way fundamentally different from yourself, and if you can convincingly prove your case via polite conversation you will win the argument (if there is a local dispute it’s generally possible to get more eyeballs on it by escalating to a broader group of volunteers).

* * *

P.S. someone named Slartibartfast turning down a chance to work on the real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide?

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#20

Post by jacobolus »

pcrh wrote: post #8

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

One big problem is that many “real” scholars discount the importance of making sure Wikipedia has good (comprehensive, accurate, well sourced) articles about their areas of expertise, leaving the task to the (often misguided) efforts of amateur enthusiasts.

A wikipedia article is going to have orders of magnitude more influence than nearly any journal article or textbook, and scholars should put at least a basic amount of effort into improving them.

It should be seen as a kind of public outreach.

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