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Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

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Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#81

Post by tediousdemise »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #80

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to extrapolate this finding to other areas of society where a small percentage of people write their opinions and then a much larger percent of people read them, eventually shaping aggregate opinion independently of any opinion held predominantly by “lurkers.” How many elections have been shaped by 4chan, Reddit, and Facebook comments? There have been a few studies on this, eg in 2016 [0]…

> a small percentage of people write their opinions and then a much larger percent of people read them, eventually shaping aggregate opinion independently of any opinion held predominantly by “lurkers.”

ELI5 brainwashing

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#82

Post by tediousdemise »

6177c40f wrote: post #65
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.

What about it makes it not science?

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

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#84

Post by istinetz »

aqme28 wrote: post #18
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.

An AI would be trained on human decisions, and unless we're careful it can easily have the same biases as human decision making.

at least some biases we can avoid. We can scrub the training data from mentioning gender or race. We can not include photos of people, to avoid the attractiveness halo effect.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#85

Post by mikotodomo »

Wikipedia is an amazing wonder of the internet. I could spend ten hours a day reading deep into topics and related topics I only learned because of the initial curiosity I had. But that's beside the point. There is such thorough coverage of all topics of every field so I would indeed expect that judges are using it to look things up because of how convenient it is.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#86

Post by wisnoskij »

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…

But that is what influencing is. By definition, these results show that cases given Wikipedia articles exert an otherwise unproportional influence on the legal landscape.

Not a particularly surprising result, but it shows how much of an effect such a little thing can have, and how big of an influence for example controlling what articles published vs not published could have over time.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#87

Post by mellosouls »

mikotodomo wrote: post #85

Wikipedia is an amazing wonder of the internet. I could spend ten hours a day reading deep into topics and related topics I only learned because of the initial curiosity I had. But that's beside the point. There is such thorough coverage of all topics of every field so I would indeed expect that judges are using it to look things up because of how convenient it is.

The problem is that in certain subjects (especially those with a potential ethical dimension like social and cultural pages) there is significant bias towards the left (I say that as a left-leaning person).

That's not healthy at all when being used as a resource without awareness and significant caution.

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#88

Post by 8note »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #58
phpisthebest wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you give an example of a wikipedia page that you think shows bias on the same level as PragerU?

Here's a fun hour and a half analysis on a page related to Ukraine: https://youtu.be/3kaaYvauNho

Re: Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#90

Post by cmeacham98 »

hither_shores wrote: post #70
cmeacham98 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of a wikipedia page that you think shows bias on the same level as PragerU?

Browse through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_neutral_poi... and you'll find plenty. For example: > Mohammed Zakir (also known as Meyra) was an Ethiopian Oromo nationalist. Regarded as "legendary Oromo hero", he is noted for his high contribution to keep the lights of Oromo nationalism shining after the martyrdom of his two hero colleagues called Elemo Qiltu and Ahmad Taqi ... the Oromos would never…

If you go to the page in question (available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Zakir_Meyra) it has not one but two warnings at the top of the page about the content within. Is this not an example of Wikipedia's process working as intended?
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