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Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

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Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#101

Post by bdowling »

laGrenouille wrote: post #29
martin_drapeau wrote: post #15

How did clerks/lawyers find those articles on Wikipedia? Through Google I reckon. I wonder how bad/good the search is for court judgements of their existing system. 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.

LexisNexis, which does other things now but started in the legal space, offers a huge collection of legal opinions with a fairly good search and linking capabilities. Most clerks and law professionals would have access to it. 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 p…

> ... the succinct summarization of the legal opinions.

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.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#103

Post by stevage »

ajross wrote: post #34
feet wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that law clerks are using wikipedia as an easy way to find info on cases, which isn't entirely surprising to me

Exactly, Wikipedia is the first step for almost every expert professional in every profession. We all do it, and the world is better for it. 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 obv…

Your second comment is incorrect.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#104

Post by stevage »

gergov wrote: post #44
jorgesborges wrote: post #35

>Unsurprisingly, the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts... The researchers suspect this is showing that Wikipedia is used more by judges or clerks who have a heavier workload, for whom the convenience of Wikipedia offers a greater attraction. 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 digitiz…

you would be surprised how the world operates outside of tech 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

That movement has been around a long time - see Code for America and its offshoots for example. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It's easy to think that new tech will fix everything but you need to understand the bureaucracy the tech resides within.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#105

Post by edgyquant »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #64

Can we stop calling stuff like this a "study"? This is not science, this is essentially journalism. 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.

This is a statistical study, what are you talking about?

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#106

Post by stevage »

gwern wrote: post #95
DontchaKnowit wrote: post #64

Can we stop calling stuff like this a "study"? This is not science, this is essentially journalism. 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.

This is definitely a study and science. It's actually a rather high quality experiment too, I was in awe of the way they carefully constructed the pairs of decisions to make them as identical as possible, and then got the same law student to write an article for each member of a pair before randomizing to ensure they were written as similarly as possible. Everyone knows that you should be blocking to maximize statist…

I still don't understand why they bothered writing the articles for the ones that weren't being uploaded. I'm sure there's a reason, it just wasn't obvious to me.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#108

Post by edgyquant »

tediousdemise wrote: post #82
6177c40f wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it makes it not science?

Concluding that knowledge influences behavior isn't science. It's common sense.

You have no idea what science is. Suggesting a hypothesis and then proving it via rigorous testing is what science means. It isn’t whatever the hell you want it to be nor is “science” anything but a method to disprove hypotheses.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#109

Post by stevage »

tediousdemise wrote: post #79

Knowledge influences behavior? No way, I don't believe it. 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…

To me, the fact that Wikipedia influences law is surprising. I would not have expected judges or their clerks to rely on Wikipedia or a resource.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#110

Post by mch82 »

Curious what people think about the ethics of this study?

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?

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