[HN Gopher] How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
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How Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
Author : czl_my
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-07-27 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.csail.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.csail.mit.edu)
| pcrh wrote:
| The referenced article on a similar effect for scientific
| citations can be found below.
|
| This isn't an entirely trivial matter, as it shows that "random"
| persons may be able to shape judicial and scientific narratives
| through wikipedia.
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505
| jacobolus wrote:
| One big problem is that many "real" scholars discount the
| importance of making sure Wikipedia has good (comprehensive,
| accurate, well sourced) articles about their areas of
| expertise, leaving the task to the (often misguided) efforts of
| amateur enthusiasts.
|
| A wikipedia article is going to have orders of magnitude more
| influence than nearly any journal article or textbook, and
| scholars should put at least a basic amount of effort into
| improving them.
|
| It should be seen as a kind of public outreach.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Was this research funded by LexisNexis and West Publishing?
| [deleted]
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The partisanship on Wikipedia is becoming more and more visible.
| Here's my favorite example [0]. One of the candidates has clearly
| been given a subpar picture and then had his profile locked from
| editing so that it can't be changed. A quick Google search shows
| scores of better pictures, leading me to believe that this is
| intentional sabotage by the opposing candidate.
|
| Fortunately, this is the kind of thing we can all sit back and
| laugh at. If a candidate can't be arsed to hire a competent PR
| firm to handle their public profiles, then they probably don't
| deserve the position.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_New_Mexico_gubernatoria...
| salawat wrote:
| I'd imagine in the same way as alcohol does a driver...
| t_mann wrote:
| A study that literally affects the constitutional landscape of a
| nation based on coin flips - the ethics review board discussions
| must have been interesting.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Most (all?) of those decisions were going to come down the same
| way regardless; the judge (or clerk or amicus brief author or
| whoever) had already decided and the citations are just a way
| of making up a post-facto justification.
|
| There's even a whole "judicial philosophy" based around this
| method of deciding first (based on personal preference or coin
| tosses or bribes or whatever) and then cherry-picking citations
| to pretend it wasn't really your own decision / avoid having to
| explain your reasoning: so-called "originalism". And it goes
| back decades, long before Wikipedia.
| flipbrad wrote:
| Finding a source that conveniently supports the judgement you
| wish to deliver, is not quite the same thing as being swayed by
| the source you come across. Both would manifest as an increase
| in citations, and it's hard to tell which has occurred here
| (perhaps a mix - but in what ratio?)
| t_mann wrote:
| > it's hard to tell which has occurred here
|
| I guess there's only one way to really find out :D
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| 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.
| jacobolus wrote:
| 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 or
| others look for evidence of something, they find a number of
| sources that seem to corroborate the claim, but under close
| inspection turn out to a circular chain built on flimflam;
| unfortunately that close inspection often never happens.
|
| Students should be encouraged to cite Wikipedia when they found
| information in Wikipedia, so that when they grow up and start
| writing real research papers they will continue citing
| Wikipedia when they find information there.
|
| Finding information somewhere and then not citing it (or citing
| some random other source that actually says something
| different) erodes the whole academic project. Any teacher who
| tells their students not to cite Wikipedia should be ashamed.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| 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.
| jacobolus wrote:
| 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 fixing, there are another 100 that nobody
| ever notices.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I find obvious errors all the time, but the pages are
| locked. This is enough of a barrier to stop me from
| trying to fix it.
|
| Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction
| listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.
| jacobolus wrote:
| If you can't be bothered to sign up for a free account,
| it's unlikely you'll do the (sometimes nontrivial) amount
| of research required to prove your case if you get in an
| edit war with another author.
|
| You could equally well say "I find obvious errors in
| textbooks / lecture videos / journal articles / paper
| encyclopedias / ... all the time but it's too hard to
| contact the author so I don't do anything about it".
|
| The main difference is that in Wikipedia you _can_ do
| something about it with some extra effort. So it's
| actually a much better situation than most kinds of
| resources.
|
| The pages that are "locked" are usually locked because
| they are spam magnets. Not allowing IP edits is
| unfortunate (and does discourage simple corrections to
| articles), but in the highest traffic parts of the site
| the work saved from not having to revert dozens of low-
| effort vandal posts is (at least arguably) worth the
| downside.
|
| > _overruled by partisan_
|
| You wouldn't believe the amount of abject nonsense and
| spam that gets cleaned up by those "partisans". But
| Wikipedia is an open project, the "partisans" here are
| just other (slightly more experienced) volunteers not in
| any way fundamentally different from yourself, and if you
| can convincingly prove your case via polite conversation
| you will win the argument (if there is a local dispute
| it's generally possible to get more eyeballs on it by
| escalating to a broader group of volunteers).
| retcon wrote:
| Sadly I think that the value of Wikipedia in this lamentable
| example of judicial laziness and professional under funding is
| the web just happens to be more easily searched than LEXIS.
| Easily != competently.
|
| Ed. competently replaced usefully
| mikece wrote:
| 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 be
| editing a page and who doesn't.
| pcrh wrote:
| Wikipedia may be a good start if you're completely clueless
| about a topic. But, academically-speaking, it doesn't last
| long. You're not going to be able to produce anything more
| insightful than a fresher's last minute sunday night essay
| using wikipedia.
| corrral wrote:
| > 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 name-dropping of what are
| considered major works in the field. There may also be a list
| of abbreviations the book will use, and those often include
| several major works in the field that 'll come up often in
| the body text.
|
| That's your list of books and papers to find and read. Repeat
| that technique with each of those books and papers, too, if
| you want to keep going deeper.
|
| Often you can get enough off an Amazon or Google preview of a
| book for this to work. Plus, libraries exist, and you pull
| that kind of information out of _several_ books (which can be
| handy--anything that appears more than once deserves special
| attention) in less than an hour, without checking anything
| out. And there 's always Library Genesis, which may not have
| _every_ book but probably has at least one in your interest
| area that can be mined in this way.
|
| Wikipedia's _sort of_ useful for this, at least for tracking
| down a first work to attack with this approach, but the
| problem is that many articles don 't cite highly-regarded or
| authoritative or landmark works on the topic, so much as
| whatever the author(s) happened to have handy or what was
| easiest to find _online_ (a whole hell of a lot of great
| information is still not available on the Web, even in 2022,
| including material in very recent books, not just pre-Web
| ones, or is available on the Web but only in poorly- or not-
| indexed-by-web-search-engines under-copyright ebooks).
| jacobolus wrote:
| The most useful tool is the academic citation graph, e.g.
| via Google Scholar.
|
| Start with a couple keywords. Click through the "cited by
| n" links on the top few papers. For papers that don't have
| PDFs freely available, find DOIs and put them into Sci-hub.
| Books can often be found at the Internet Archive, Google
| Books, or libgen. At the start, skim skim skim.
|
| Look at what links forward and backward from the papers you
| see. Hunt for new keywords to try. Go a few hops all around
| the graph. It often doesn't take too long to get a rough
| lay of the land.
| corrral wrote:
| Thanks for the reminder--I often forget about Google's
| various less-prominent tools and services.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Academic citation graphs are invaluable WHERE the topic
| is academic, but this post (like most citations I would
| venture to say) is an example of citing Wikipedia that
| would generally not be considered academic or in the
| results of the articles and case law of
| scholar.google.com.
|
| There is a huge body of knowledge that lies (dare I say)
| in a Google search. You just need to know how to evaluate
| the search results with a reasonable criteria of
| notability, relevance, accuracy, etc.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Very well said, I'm writing a book (popular narrative non-
| fiction) and the research process has led me to the exact
| same conclusion. Find a couple "pinnacle" books related to
| the domain/subject/question you're interested in, and read
| the Preface, Introduction, Ch. 1, etc. This is often the
| only place in a book authors are candid enough to
| _directly_ answer the question of "why am I writing this
| and how does it relate to what other's have done?"
|
| No shade intended, if anything I need to work on this
| style. I'm too nervous of making it sound like other
| people's ideas are my own, but then I end up writing a
| block of defensive-sounding citation & qualification, and
| nobody wants to read that...
|
| Anyways, well said.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Don't forget to search on https://news.ycombinator.com/ !
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "The assigned judge, conscious of the heavy work already
| delegated to his clerks, decides to conduct his own research."
|
| More likely, today's clerks look at Wikipedia.
| retcon wrote:
| Hang on, doesn't deliberate manipulation of the consumption of
| counterfactual legal precedent by a sitting judiciary
| (withholding with measurable effect the countering case
| references is the study method) only result in a spate of
| mistrials?
|
| Ed. legal precedent replaced sources for clarity of this
| significance
| zucker42 wrote:
| Forget the internet for a second and imagine there was a
| collection of cases in a book compiled by a group of law
| professors and legal students, summarized for easy reference.
| That book omits some cases that are relevant to the subject of
| the book for one reason or another. A judge/clerk reads that
| book to gain insight to some of the cases in a particular area.
| Is that grounds for a mistrial? Clearly not, IMO.
|
| This is just that with a different medium.
| jacobolus wrote:
| A mistrial because the judge did a google search and found the
| article a hired law student wrote carefully and accurately and
| added to a publicly available source?
| commoner wrote:
| This is similar to the open access citation advantage (FUTON
| bias):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_citation_advantage
|
| Articles on Wikipedia and in open access journals are more
| accessible than paywalled sources, which means that people will
| read them more often.
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(page generated 2022-07-27 23:00 UTC)