Litigants could game Wikipedia to influence legal decisions, according to new research.
The finding has sparked concerns that judicial decisions are being shaped by unreliable information.
The openness of Wikipedia could also lead legal judgements to be manipulated.
The case against Wikipedia
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Busy judges use the site to keep up with developments in case law but the shortcut is hazardous.
While Wikipedia provides anenormous breadthof free information, research on the sites accuracy and biases has produced mixed results.
Ad hoc topic coverage and unknown authorship add further vulnerabilities.
Legal precedents
The study focused on Wikipedias influence on judges in Ireland.
The country shares key similarities with othercommon lawsystems, such as US and UK.
Given the greater coverage of US court cases on Wikipedia, its influence might be even larger.
The researchers created 154 new Wikipedia entries on Irish Supreme Court cases.
Most were written by law students under faculty supervision.
The other half were kept offline.
This provided a counterfactual basis for what happens to cases without an entry on the site.
The uploaded entries were uploaded were highly visible on search engines.
The team then tracked how often the articles were cited in judicial decisions.
They further measured whether the arguments in court judgments echoed the Wikipedia pages.
Strikingly, the language used in Wikipedia entries was shown to influence the actual arguments used in judicial decisions.
Legal damages
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, expressed some initial concerns about report.
In fact, reviewingnew pagesis one of the most importantmaintenance taskson our free knowledge website.
The researchers recommend further measures.
One isrecruitinglegal professionals as supervising editors to certify page quality.
Another is augmenting thefree legalcontent onmoreauthoritativesites.
In either case, we envision a strong role for professional societies, said Thompson.
you’ve got the option to read the study paperhere.
Story byThomas Macaulay
Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he e(show all)Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he enjoys playing chess (badly) and the guitar (even worse).
