Lyra Martin Tech 08.03.2022 00:Aug AM EDT

Wikipedia Articles Have Influenced Legal Judgments, Experiment Shows

A study discovered that Wikipedia articles increased citations of court rulings by 20% and that most sources were used to back up the judge's findings.

Research Says Published Wikipedia Entries Raised Citations to a Court Judgment by 20%

A group of researchers from Maynooth University in Ireland, MIT, and Cornell University developed more than 150 new Wikipedia entries documenting decisions by the Irish Supreme Court as part of a controlled experiment.

Then they decided to post half of the articles on the site randomly. Irish courts use a hierarchical structure similar to that of the US or the UK, with judgments issued by higher courts having precedential value over those made by subordinate courts. Additionally, there weren't many Wikipedia entries regarding decisions by the Irish Supreme Court at the start of the project.

The researchers found that published Wikipedia articles increased by 20% the number of citations to a specific court ruling. The most common use of sources in a judgment was to support the judge's conclusions.

They also employed computer tools to compare judges' words in their rulings. They found parallels that suggested judges could have copied information from the Wikipedia articles they had read.

Neil Thompson, a research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, has looked into how Wikipedia changes impact citations in academic journal articles. The idea that modifications with questionable origins might affect experts' knowledge and critical judgments disturb him.

As you get to more specialized knowledge, Thompson asserts, "it becomes more important to have someone who has a thorough understanding."

Because of the knowledge gap on the rest of the internet, Wikipedia's trustworthiness is no longer in doubt. Wikipedia also maintains an astonishing level of impact, with 6.5 million entries updated at a pace of about two revisions per second and ranking as the seventh-most visited website globally.

Elon Musk Criticized Wikipedia for Losing its Objectivity After Preventing Changes to Its Entry About Recession

In response to allegations that it was meddling with the Biden administration by barring users from editing its "recession" article, Elon Musk attacked Wikipedia on Friday (July 29) for "losing its neutrality."

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, is said to have a net worth of $263 billion, making him the wealthiest person in the world. Musk tweeted about Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia.

Following the release of the most recent economic numbers that showed a drop in GDP, the Biden administration is challenging the definition of the word on Wikipedia. Consequently, people could not edit the recession article on Wikipedia.

After making changes to the recession article on Wikipedia, user "Soibangla" erased a mention of the term's recognized meaning.

The user's addition states that economists have no consensus on what qualifies as a recession.

The page had a lock symbol in the top right corner as of Friday (July 29) morning, suggesting that it had been put into semi-protection mode so that "unregistered users and accounts that are not verified or autoconfirmed" could not edit the content.

Dozens of individuals raced to the website to modify the entry, which prompted the adjustment. They were probably motivated by Thursday's (July 28) Commerce Department data showing a 0.9% decline in the nation's GDP.

The national economy has shrunk for the second quarter, corresponding to the conventional definition of a recession.

However, the Biden administration has argued that there is no recession at this time. In briefings to the media, the president and his advisers have adamantly refused to use the phrase.