“How Wikipedia Influences Judicial Behavior”, 2022-07-27 (; backlinks; similar):
[on et al 2022] Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Maynooth University, Ireland came up with a friendly stress test: creating new legal Wikipedia articles to examine how they affect the legal decisions of judges.
They set off by developing over 150 new Wikipedia articles on Irish Supreme Court decisions, written by law students, half of which were randomly chosen to be uploaded where they could be used by judges, clerks, lawyers, and so on—the “treatment” group. The other half were kept offline, and this second group of cases provided the counterfactual basis of what would happen to a case absent a Wikipedia article about it (the “control”).
They 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.
It turned out the influx of articles tipped the scales: getting a Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20%. The increase was statistically-significant and the effect was particularly strong for cases that supported the argument the citing judge was making in their decision (but not the converse). Unsurprisingly, the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts—the High Court—and mostly absent for citations by appellate courts—the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal. The researchers suspect that this is showing that Wikipedia is used more by judges or clerks who have a heavier workload, for whom the convenience of Wikipedia offers a greater attraction.
…That [ et al 2017] led Brian McKenzie, an associate professor at Maynooth University, to make a call. “I was working with students to add articles to Wikipedia at the time I read Neil’s research on the influence of Wikipedia on scientific research”, explains McKenzie. “There were only a handful of Irish Supreme Court cases on Wikipedia so I reached out to Neil to ask if he wanted to design another iteration of his experiment using court cases.”
…The Irish legal system proved the perfect testbed, as it shares a key similarity with other national legal systems such as the UK and U.S.—it operates within a hierarchical court structure where decisions of higher courts subsequently bind lower courts. Also, there are relatively few Wikipedia articles on Irish Supreme Court decisions compared to those of the US Supreme Court—over the course of their project, the researchers increased the number of such articles 10×.
In addition to looking at the case citations made in the decisions, the team also analyzed the language used in the written decision using natural language processing. What they found were the linguistic fingerprints of the Wikipedia articles that they’d created.
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