The legal articles on Wikipedia have a huge impact on the decision of the judges, according to a new study led by an expert from MIT.
The study aims to study how the sources on the website affect the reasoning capability of the judges on the court.
Wikipedia Articles Affect Judges' Decision
(Photo : Oberon Copeland @veryinformed.com from Unsplash)
Wikipedia articles heavily influence the reasoning ability of the judges with a heavier workload.
In a report by The Independent, Neil Thompson and his team tested out an experiment to see if Wikipedia articles have a bearing on the judges' decisions.
The lead researcher from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) randomly selected Wikipedia articles based on the Irish Supreme Court decisions. Some of them came from law students.
In order to determine if the articles impact the judges' decisions, the researchers used two parameters in the study. First, they look after the possibility of the articles to be cited and how the court contents are obtained from Wikipedia.
To their surprise, the group discovered that the online citations of the cases from a Wikipedia article were over 20%. It should be noted that the significant increase was more evident in the lower courts than in the High Court.
However, the researchers found that the citations were nowhere to be found in the Court of appeal and the Supreme Court.
With that being said, Thompson and his team concluded that those judges with hectic workloads often use Wikipedia.
According to him, this was the first time they did a "randomized field experiment," which targets to determine how the legal articles affect the judges regarding behavioral thinking.
Moreover, he pointed out that the effect was more of causation and not only correlation.
"The fact that we wrote up all these cases, but the only ones that ended up on Wikipedia were those that won the proverbial 'coin flip,' allows us to show that Wikipedia is influencing both what judges cite and how they write up their decisions," Thompson said.
To view the study entitled "Trial by Internet: A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia's Influence on Judges' Legal Reasoning," visit SSRN.
Related Article: This 'Simple' Lifehack Explains Everything On Wikipedia As If You Were A Five-Year-Old
Wikipedia Might Be Unreliable Sometimes
Although the study signals that judges even use Wikipedia as a legal source for this decision, it's a glaring fact that unreliable information can be lurking on the website as well.
Thompson said that ensuring the quality of online information is a priority. If the public continues to cite untrusted sources, then this could be an alarming trend for the people.
Interestingly, the researchers also found that some judges have paraphrased some Wikipedia articles. The based entries will be their guide for their opinion.
Having said that, the manipulation of information can happen anywhere. As such, you should carefully check if the sources that you are using are not vulnerable to sudden changes.
In other news, The New York Post reported that Elon Musk criticized Wikipedia because the website is "losing its objectivity." The statement came after the platform removed the edit feature of the recession page.
Read Also: Study Shows Wikipedia Could Serve As Early Warning Device For Species Extinction
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Written by Joseph Henry
