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How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

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Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#51

Post by jacobolus »

dhosek wrote: post #35
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 wrote about some interesting discrepancies within Wikipedia for my sporadic newsletter last year: https://dahosek.substack.com/p/something-interesting-eda

Interesting. None of the versions here are wrong exactly (i.e. in none of these cases were Wikipedians making things up or clearly misconstruing what they read), but sources out in the world that Wikipedia authors pulled their information from have incomplete stories, and sometimes one version contradicts the other.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#52

Post by the_af »

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.

If I understand the article correctly, it's not about incorrect information -- i.e. it's not claiming Wikipedia misleads judges because the articles are wrong -- but about "influence" of Wikipedia on decisions; an influence that could be gamed by an adversarial actor.

References themselves are gameable. They argue references mentioned in Wikipedia are more likely to be cited by a judge!

This is not about the quality of Wikipedia, but about its undue influence and how easy it is to game it, references included!

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#54

Post by MisterMower »

mountainb wrote: post #47
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.

The citations on Wikipedia articles are often either broken, in a foreign language, or not up to an academic standard. However, following this practice is what eventually lead me to stop using Wikipedia for anything. When I tried to trace the citations to make my research easier, I found it actually made it a lot slower because I kept running into junk. Before I actually paid attention to the citations on a broad sel…

They have weird requirements for citations. Want to cite a link to a blog where a guy has spent 20,000 hours researching a topic but doesn’t have a degree? Not allowed. Want to post a link to a NYT article written by a journalist with no relevant experience in that same field? Go for it. It’s really strange. It’s like they’re aiming for narrative over fact or something.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#55

Post by bawolff »

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…

Not directing this comment at you, but to the other children of this thread:

So much criticism of wikipedia seems to come down to: wikipedia did X. I think X is wrong. Other people don't see it that way. I don't want to spend the time proving my point. How dare wikipedia not just take me, a random internet stranger, at my word.

All i want to know is how do y'all think it could possibly work differently? Everybody thinks they are right. Nobody intentionally is wrong. Obviously if you just show up, unwilling to explain why you are right or unwilling to accept compelling counter arguments to your point, its not going to go your way. Why would anybody think it would?

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#56

Post by [deleted] »

jasonhansel wrote: post #42
actually_a_dog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The actual paper shows it was approved by the ethics boards of two universities. Here is a quote from the paper describing the actual methodology for creating the articles: > The experiment featured Wikipedia entries authored by faculty and by law students under faculty supervision, who each had access, through their university library, to all the relevant primary and secondary legal materials available t…

Unfortunately, some IRBs are notoriously bad at preventing unethical research practices, since in practice they are often more focused on ensuring adherence to various bureaucratic requirements. The issue isn't that they were misleading anyone; the issue is that they were, for research purposes, trying (successfully) to influence the outcomes of court cases without the subjects' consent.

[deleted]

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#57

Post by wrp »

corrral wrote: post #6
mikece wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

Academic journal articles may be more convenient, because they usually focus on the key citations for a field in the brief literature review. Use Google Scholar to find some, then download from Sci-Hub.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#58

Post by omegalulw »

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.

The point is that the relevant feedback is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, not that you should not cite Wikipedia. They sound similar but they are fundamentally very different.

For former encourages the behaviour of finding other sources that are reliable. The latter encourages quoting Wikipedia without citing it.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#59

Post by pdonis »

"because randomized experiments are the gold standard for this type of research, we know the effect we are seeing is causation, not just correlation"

No, they don't. Correlation is not causation, even if you see it in a randomized experiment. With shoddy reasoning like this, it's no wonder science has a replication crisis.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#60

Post by Spooky23 »

the_af wrote: post #52
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.

If I understand the article correctly, it's not about incorrect information -- i.e. it's not claiming Wikipedia misleads judges because the articles are wrong -- but about "influence" of Wikipedia on decisions; an influence that could be gamed by an adversarial actor. References themselves are gameable. They argue references mentioned in Wikipedia are more likely to be cited by a judge! This is not about the quality…

Judges would consult encyclopedias and similar resources 40 years ago.

The difference is that a crowdsourced resource like Wikipedia is easier to manipulate by people who understand the system. There are plenty of PR specialists who get client articles pushed into Wikipedia or updated to their liking.

Wikipedia is a treasure, but it’s also vulnerable to a bunch of different attacks.

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