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Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

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Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#41

Post by vharuck »

_fat_santa wrote: post #37
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…

If I had to bet, they have those systems but they are a pain to use. If I had to speculate, it would be a lot like those citation search sites you used in College, they simply didn’t have the usability of Google. You had to enter search terms very specifically, whereas with Google you just search for what you want and Google figures out how to structure the query best to give you the results you want. I can totally s…

Not to mention that Wikipedia also acts as a filter for importance. Important cases are more likely to have articles. This is bad for exhaustive research, but great for "I need to write a summary by tomorrow."

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#42

Post by cmeacham98 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #38
Tostino wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending PreagerU is anything but blatant propaganda is silly.

Pretending Wikipedia isn't also, is silly. This week's nonsense with the definition of 'recession' is proof enough of that. If you want to argue magnitude, you've already conceded what Wikipedia is (and I don't deny PragerU is what you claim it is).

Wikipedia is not perfectly unbiased, but if you honestly believe it is even comparable to PragerU you should seriously talk to someone about your biases and perception of the world.

There are left-wing equivalents of PragerU (ex: the Gravel Institute) that are just as far away from Wikipedia as PragerU is.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#43

Post by photochemsyn »

This study should have been controlled by asking whether courts had access to the curated legal databases (primarily LexisNexis, I imagine):

> "...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).

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#44

Post by gergov »

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

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#45

Post by throwawy69690 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #13
jbirer wrote: post #12

After watching a female judge sentence a child with autism for killing his rapist and childhood abuser, after he was acquited by a male judge years before, I kind of lost faith in all types of judicial process. AI needs to take over for such things.

This goes against double jeopardy. Do you have a reference?

No post body was provided.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#47

Post by phpisthebest »

roenxi wrote: post #40
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #7

This is alarming but I'm not sure the study actually finds that "Wikipedia influences judicial behavior" in the way most readers would understand that term - influencing decisions and sentence. 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 behav…

It isn't that obvious that this is alarming. What are we alarmed about? 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 natur…

>>What are we alarmed about?

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

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#48

Post by phpisthebest »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #42
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending Wikipedia isn't also, is silly. This week's nonsense with the definition of 'recession' is proof enough of that. If you want to argue magnitude, you've already conceded what Wikipedia is (and I don't deny PragerU is what you claim it is).

Wikipedia is not perfectly unbiased, but if you honestly believe it is even comparable to PragerU you should seriously talk to someone about your biases and perception of the world. There are left-wing equivalents of PragerU (ex: the Gravel Institute) that are just as far away from Wikipedia as PragerU is.

I think it depends on the topic and section of wikipedia.

If you get into the political area's of wikipeda, I think the bias of Wikipedia is pretty clear polar to that of PragerU.

If you stick to the pure hard sciences (physics as an example) and non-controversial events (like an earthquake) then sure they are unbiased

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#49

Post by bacchusracine »

Tostino wrote: post #26
bacchusracine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sir, I'm afraid your bias is showing...

Pretending PreagerU is anything but blatant propaganda is silly.

As the other poster pointed out, it's the pretense that Wikipedia is in any way shape or form neutral that shows the bias.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#50

Post by pushedx »

photochemsyn wrote: post #43

This study should have been controlled by asking whether courts had access to the curated legal databases (primarily LexisNexis, I imagine): > "...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 a…

The 77 cases that were given a Wikipedia article saw a 17% increase in citations after publication.

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.

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