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How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

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Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#91

Post by 15amxn15 »

asdff wrote: post #64
MisterMower wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair usually when the nyt article is wrong they issue a retraction and when the blogger is wrong they triple down

No post body was provided.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#92

Post by Gareth321 »

sien wrote: post #38
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…

Not always. Any particular two or more wikipedians who decide they don't want something in can sometimes stop it. For example, in Australia there is a body that does sport participation statistics, Ausplay. They do this every year. It's a great source for sport statistics on Australia. Two wikipedians decided that these statistics were not permissible in the sport in Australia article. They won : https://en.wikipedia…

>Now things that are controversial like IQ or the role of heritability in ability are surely going to be problematic.

FYI this kind of "wrong think" is already being removed in many articles. The way it's removed is applying the existing deep and numerous rules more strictly to information which cuts against the current dominant cultural narratives. For one of the best examples I can provide, have a look at how the "Feminism" and "Men's Rights" pages are written. Completely different standards for evidence, commentary, style, and even sections. Criticism of men's rights is evident in the heading, while of course, there is no criticism of feminism in Feminism's heading.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#93

Post by erichocean »

bawolff wrote: post #55
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…

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 thi…

Some people are activists; most people are not.

Activists are willing to invest orders of magnitude more time, energy, and discomfort into winning. They are willing to break most social norms to have their narrative become the default. They're willing to suppress facts that would support alternate narratives. They're willing to put their thumb on the scale when inconvenient facts are unavoidable. Et cetera.

Non-activists are not willing to do any of those things.

It's not about right or wrong, it's about activism: who engages in it and how much.

But sure, let's let the activists win—or force everyone to become activists to "compete". I'm sure that'll make the world a better place.

----

Or we could ban activism since it is fundamentally anti-social bullying behavior. Maybe make a "code of conduct" that prohibits it. Just spitballing here…

It's pretty simple to identify activists mechanically (and at scale): they are in the fat part of the power law for contributions. Simply limit people's ability to contribute and et voilà !, the activism problem has been vastly reduced, if not eliminated. Non-activists now have a chance.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#94

Post by pdpi »

siva7 wrote: post #89
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…

Wikipedia is not a primary source. Students can cite the original source but not wikipedia itself. The university departments i'm aware of still don't allow citing wikipedia and explicitly cover it as bad style. And i have to agree with the professors there. The quality is plain bad, last time i checked a medical article on wikipedia it was full off of claims without citations and those claims contradicted official m…

> The university departments i'm aware of still don't allow citing wikipedia and explicitly cover it as bad style.

It's worth noting that Wikipedia is not special in this regard — those same departments probably also consider it bad style to cite Britannica (and, if they don't, they should).

Encyclopaedias are meant to be starting points for research, not the ultimate destination. Editors, both of Wikipedia and otherwise, are not expected to be subject matter experts, which is why the guidance on Wikipedia is that you're not even supposed to use primary sources as reference, but rather secondary sources[0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#95

Post by rascul »

Gareth321 wrote: post #92
sien wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. Any particular two or more wikipedians who decide they don't want something in can sometimes stop it. For example, in Australia there is a body that does sport participation statistics, Ausplay. They do this every year. It's a great source for sport statistics on Australia. Two wikipedians decided that these statistics were not permissible in the sport in Australia article. They won : https://en.wikipedia…

>Now things that are controversial like IQ or the role of heritability in ability are surely going to be problematic. FYI this kind of "wrong think" is already being removed in many articles. The way it's removed is applying the existing deep and numerous rules more strictly to information which cuts against the current dominant cultural narratives. For one of the best examples I can provide, have a look at how the "…

> Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.

I was curious and I looked it up:

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#96

Post by bjornsing »

asdff wrote: post #72
bjornsing wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it a randomized controlled trial (RCT) can determine causation. But I don’t think “what they did with this setup” was an RCT. A real RCT in this context should IMHO assign new cases randomly to a “treatment” or “control” group. In this setup they assign legal precedents randomly, but all new cases are effectively under “treatment”. That’s not the same thing.

How are new cases effectively under treatment? They identified 150 decisions, wrote articles for each, and assigned half randomly to treatment or control. they did not consider newer cases beyond this set of 150. An RCT is a type of randomized experiment, but all determine causation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_experiment

You’re right. It’s the legal precedents / decisions that are the “patients” here. The new cases (that cite those precedents / decisions) are just… let’s say “test results”.

So yes, this is a way to determine causation in relation to what legal precedents / decisions will be cited in new cases depending on the contents of Wikipedia.

I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that they claimed a causal link between their Wikipedia articles and the outcome of new cases. The chosen setup cannot IMHO prove such a causal relationship, in the strict statistical sense. That would require randomizing new cases and applying the “treatment” (new Wikipedia articles) only to some of them.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#97

Post by RickJWagner »

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…

You're close to an important issue, I think.

False ideas can be spread simply by overemphasizing biased true statements and disregarding true statements that don't fit the narrative.

The effect can be multiplied by controlling the discussion through selecting the right 'questions' that are discussed.

Snopes is the exemplar.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#98

Post by bonoboTP »

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.

It's so silly for teachers to say "you are not allowed to cite Wikipedia". It's a cart-before-horse approach, mindless rule-following. The principle in academic writing is that you cite whatever you used for your research. IF you read the Wikipedia article and base some of your conclusions on its synthesis, then you MUST cite Wikipedia, citing the sources of Wikipedia would be misleading IF you don't read those cited sources yourself. It's all about traceability and credit assigment. You can of course cite also what Wikipedia cites but you have to cite Wikipedia if you use claims from there that you didn't actually get from looking at the source cited by Wikipedia.

However! It's also important to teach students how sources differ in quality or "authoritativeness". The problem with citing Wikipedia is not the citing per se but relying on that source. A peer reviewed academic journal is considered more reliable, although no source should be taken as gospel and definitive truth, especially on controversial topics.

You can even cite blog posts, personal letters, and even personal oral communication! The point is to let the reader know where your info comes from. Making students memorize rules like "don't cite Wikipedia" just results in a cargo cult, not actual understanding of critical thinking related to sources.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#99

Post by bonoboTP »

mikece wrote: post #3
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.

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…

Usually you can find survey/review articles, or textbooks and look at what they cite. You can also try to find websites of research groups in the area with good reputations and check out their recent works and the citations therein. Especially works that you see multiple times using this approach will be important core works, from which you can go further. General Google searches and Google Scholar keyword searches and exploring the citation graph are also useful.

Re: How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior

#100

Post by bawolff »

erichocean wrote: post #93
bawolff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Some people are activists; most people are not. Activists are willing to invest orders of magnitude more time, energy, and discomfort into winning. They are willing to break most social norms to have their narrative become the default. They're willing to suppress facts that would support alternate narratives. They're willing to put their thumb on the scale when inconvenient facts are unavoidable. Et cetera . Non-acti…

There are already various rules against engaging engaging in various types of bad faith behaviours. Like all disciplinary systems it is far from perfect of course, but it exists, and people get banned for behaving inapropriately every day.

Most people at the top of the power law are not evil people. Its difficult to be both prominent and evil. The real pov pushers tend to keep a lower peofile to avoid discovery. That doesn't mean prominent people dont have beliefs, everyone does, but most people can have beliefs and behave appropriately.

I think your real objection is its more difficult to argue with an experienced person who is willing to devote more time. Which is true. It is after all why in the real world expensive lawyers are worth the money.

But why is that a bad thing. If another person simply has researched the topic more than you, they should win the argument. That is life, the more effort you put in, the more likely you get a positive outcome.

If you really believe power users are more likely to behave in bad faith or maliciously, i'd like to see some proof, because i highly doubt its true.

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