How Wikipedia Can Influence Judges’ Legal Writing

Welcome to Source Notes, a Future Tense column about the internet’s information ecosystem. Responding to the paper, a High Court judicial source told the Irish Times that the idea that a Wikipedia article would be relied upon by a judge to support their reasoning for a decision “is clearly wrong.” As one judicial source put it, “Judgments are written based on the legal authorities and submissions put before the court, not on a Google search or Wikipedia.” Then again, it’s hard to dispute the outcome of the peer-reviewed study, which was published online July 27 as a preprint and is forthcoming in the Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence. At first blush, it might seem that Irish judges need a refresher of what so many of us learned back in high school: that Wikipedia is not itself a primary source for serious research, and that you’ll find yourself in trouble if you copy/paste it to your “paper.” But in fact, there’s a lot more going on here. Case in point: A judge in Illinois deferred to Wikipedia’s definition of “crotch rocket” as meaning “a ‘super sport’ or ‘super bike’ capable of great acceleration with a distinctive seat shape.” Shortly after the judicial experiment was published online in July, a concerned Wikipedia editor posted to the site’s Administrator’s Noticeboard—a place for Wikipedia users to flag concerns for the site’s community-selected leaders—to state that they were “non-plussed about Wikipedia being used this way.” For background, a few past experiments involving Wikipedia have been disastrous, such as the University of Toronto professor who in 2013 told 1,700 of his students to edit and improve Wikipedia articles on topics related to his lectures; experienced editors later found that 85 percent of the resulting changes were plagiarized. “The problem with this is that the judge doesn’t know whether the author of the Wikipedia article has any expertise.” That’s a fundamental distinction between Wikipedia and a legal textbook.