Was this research funded by LexisNexis and West Publishing?
How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#22A study that literally affects the constitutional landscape of a nation based on coin flips - the ethics review board discussions must have been interesting.
Most (all?) of those decisions were going to come down the same way regardless; the judge (or clerk or amicus brief author or whoever) had already decided and the citations are just a way of making up a post-facto justification.
There’s even a whole “judicial philosophy” based around this method of deciding first (based on personal preference or coin tosses or bribes or whatever) and then cherry-picking citations to pretend it wasn’t really your own decision / avoid having to explain your reasoning: so-called “originalism”. And it goes back decades, long before Wikipedia.
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#23Hang on, doesn't deliberate manipulation of the consumption of counterfactual legal precedent by a sitting judiciary (withholding with measurable effect the countering case references is the study method) only result in a spate of mistrials?
Ed. legal precedent replaced sources for clarity of this significance
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#24Hang on, doesn't deliberate manipulation of the consumption of counterfactual legal precedent by a sitting judiciary (withholding with measurable effect the countering case references is the study method) only result in a spate of mistrials? Ed. legal precedent replaced sources for clarity of this significance
A mistrial because the judge did a google search and found the article a hired law student wrote carefully and accurately and added to a publicly available source?
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#25It 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.
Sadly I think that the value of Wikipedia in this lamentable example of judicial laziness and professional under funding is the web just happens to be more easily searched than LEXIS. Easily != competently.
Ed. competently replaced usefully
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#26Was this research funded by LexisNexis and West Publishing?
[deleted]
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#27The partisanship on Wikipedia is becoming more and more visible. Here’s my favorite example [0]. One of the candidates has clearly been given a subpar picture and then had his profile locked from editing so that it can’t be changed. A quick Google search shows scores of better pictures, leading me to believe that this is intentional sabotage by the opposing candidate.
Fortunately, this is the kind of thing we can all sit back and laugh at. If a candidate can’t be arsed to hire a competent PR firm to handle their public profiles, then they probably don’t deserve the position.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_New_Mexico_gubernatoria...
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
Very well said, I'm writing a book (popular narrative non-fiction) and the research process has led me to the exact same conclusion. Find a couple "pinnacle" books related to the domain/subject/question you're interested in, and read the Preface, Introduction, Ch. 1, etc. This is often the only place in a book authors are candid enough to directly answer the question of "why am I writing this and how does it relate to what other's have done?"
No shade intended, if anything I need to work on this style. I'm too nervous of making it sound like other people's ideas are my own, but then I end up writing a block of defensive-sounding citation & qualification, and nobody wants to read that...
Anyways, well said.
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#29Earlier 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…
Academic citation graphs are invaluable WHERE the topic is academic, but this post (like most citations I would venture to say) is an example of citing Wikipedia that would generally not be considered academic or in the results of the articles and case law of scholar.google.com.
There is a huge body of knowledge that lies (dare I say) in a Google search. You just need to know how to evaluate the search results with a reasonable criteria of notability, relevance, accuracy, etc.
Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
#30Hang on, doesn't deliberate manipulation of the consumption of counterfactual legal precedent by a sitting judiciary (withholding with measurable effect the countering case references is the study method) only result in a spate of mistrials? Ed. legal precedent replaced sources for clarity of this significance
Forget the internet for a second and imagine there was a collection of cases in a book compiled by a group of law professors and legal students, summarized for easy reference. That book omits some cases that are relevant to the subject of the book for one reason or another. A judge/clerk reads that book to gain insight to some of the cases in a particular area. Is that grounds for a mistrial? Clearly not, IMO.
This is just that with a different medium.