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A study led by Neil Thompson from MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) discovered that judges were more likely to cite legal cases with a Wikipedia article. It attempts to measure how knowledge gleaned from Wikipedia may play out in one specific realm: the courts. They produced over 150 new Wikipedia articles on Irish Supreme Court decisions, written by law students half of which were randomly chosen to be uploaded online, while the other half were kept offline.
The existence of a Wiki page for a case increased its citations by over 20 percent. The boost was pronounced when a case supported a judge's argument, and the language of the articles sometimes manifested in the decisions. The finding has raised concerns that court decisions are shaped by unreliable information. Wikipedia's openness can also lead to legal statements being manipulated. The research team then looked at two measures: whether the cases were more likely to be cited as precedents by subsequent judicial decisions, and whether the argumentation in court judgments echoed the linguistic content of the new Wikipedia pages.
The MIT research team said that these citations mainly came from lower courts rather than the Supreme Court itself or the Court of Appeal. This is the first randomized field experiment that investigates the influence of legal sources on judicial behavior. And because randomized experiments are the gold standard for this type of research, we know the effect we are seeing is causation and not just correlation.
Wikipedia is increasingly cited in legal scholarship and court judgments. Busy judges use the site to keep up with developments in case law but the shortcut is hazardous. However, even without any difference in the 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. 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.
CSAIL also noted that the Irish legal system was an ideal testing ground. The team also analyzed the language used in the written decision using natural language processing. The country shares key similarities with other common law systems, such as US and UK. Notably, lower courts are bound by the decisions made in higher courts, while judges cite previous cases to determine the applicable legal principle.
The researchers increased the number of relevant articles tenfold just by writing examples for the study. One is recruiting legal professionals as supervising editors to certify page quality. Another is augmenting the free legal content on more authoritative sites. The findings are potentially problematic. While the cases themselves might be sound, Wikipedia isn't always accurate. The research has been published in The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence.
