Litigants could abuse Wikipedia to influence legal decisions, according to new research.
An investigation led by Neil Thompson of MIT’s Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) found that judges previously cited legal cases that included a Wikipedia article.
The finding has raised concerns that court decisions are shaped by unreliable information. Wikipedia’s openness can also lead to legal statements being manipulated.
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“A well-equipped litigant might encourage his legal team to anonymously integrate their own analysis of a relevant precedent into a Wikipedia article early on in a trial, hoping to catch the attention of the judge or his clerk later on, Thompson said. TNW.
The case against Wikipedia
Wikipedia is quoted more and more in legal science and court decisions.
Busy judges use the site to keep up with developments in case law, but the shortcut is dangerous.
While Wikipedia is a huge width of free information, research into the site’s accuracy and bias has yielded mixed results. Ad hoc topic coverage and unknown authorship add even more vulnerabilities.
“The worst outcome would be for a judge to rely on Wikipedia to get them to decide a case differently than if they had read either a secondary expert source or the cited precedent itself,” Thompson said.
“However, even without any difference in outcome, judges’ reliance on Wikipedia to determine applicable law undermines the litigant’s expectation that the court’s reasoning is only the product of expertise.”
Legal precedents
The study focused on Wikipedia’s influence on judges in Ireland.
The country shares important similarities with other common law systems, such as the US and the UK. In particular, lower courts are bound by the decisions of higher courts, while judges cite previous cases to determine the applicable legal principle.
Unlike in the US, however, Irish court decisions are rarely covered in Wikipedia, which makes it easier to analyze the impact of new entries.
Given the greater coverage of American lawsuits on Wikipedia, its influence could be even greater.
The researchers created 154 new Wikipedia entries on Irish Supreme Court cases. Most were written were law students under faculty supervision.
Each author had access to relevant legal material, but their names, expertise and potential biases were opaque.
Half of the articles were randomly selected to be uploaded to Wikipedia, where judges, clerks and lawyers had access to them. The other half was kept offline. This provided a counterfactual basis for what happens to cases without listing on the site.
The uploaded entries were highly visible on search engines.
“Our Wikipedia articles were the first search result on Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo in almost every case when searched by decision title or citation alone,” the study authors wrote.
The team then tracked how often the articles were cited in court rulings. They further measured whether the arguments in court decisions matched the Wikipedia pages.
The verdict
The study found that a Wikipedia article increases the number of citations from a case in Ireland by more than 20%. This boost was much greater for lower court citations, suggesting the site is more used by judges or clerks with heavier workloads.
Notably, the language used in Wikipedia articles influences the factual arguments used in court decisions.
“Given the increased coverage of US lawsuits on Wikipedia, Wikipedia’s influence on the use of precedents could be expected to be even greater.Thompson said.
Legal damage
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, initially expressed some concern about the report.
The nonprofit noted that it had limited access to the research information, such as the full list of articles and the number of citations they received.
A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said:
In this case, we want to take into account that the pages added to Wikipedia were added as part of this research by law students and would likely have been further edited and improved by Wikipedia volunteer editors from around the world who monitor articles to maintain verifiability of content.
In fact review new pages is one of the most important maintenance tasks on our free knowledge website.
The researchers recommend further measures.
One is recruitment legal professionals as supervising editors to certify page quality.
Another is to increase the free legal content ofn Lake authoritative sites. A potential model it is Oyez projectwhich provides free summaries of recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals.
“In both cases, we see a strong role for professional associations,” says Thompson.
“We hope they will see our results and form expert committees to work with Wikipedia and other sources of information to make them more authoritative.”
You can read the study paper here.