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Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
- czl_my 4y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- amriksohata 4y agoThis is why in itself Wikipedia cannot be a trusted source but should be treated as purely, an extension of the media. They choose who they can cite and who they cannot.
- nehalem 4y agoCould you elaborate? I do see the issue about reliability, but I don’t see how this study is related? They added a random selection of cases and provided summaries without intentional bias. Except for a complete set, this is always the case for every database of cases.
- exadrid 4y agoWikipedia has a very clear pro-science and pro-reality bias, and that's a good thing. You would not want news like OAN to be cited on their.
- coffeeblack 4y agoThe problem is that the news sources that Wp trusts have gone completely bananas over the past decade.
- tomrod 4y agoCitation, please.
- vanattab 4y agoJust ask anyone over 40...
- phdelightful 4y agoI wish those people over 40 hadn't put a US government in place that abolished the fairness doctrine. Then our news sources would probably not be so bananas.
- andsoitis 4y ago> IRC, as an example, Newsweek lost its trusted status Precisely, it lost its trusted status, but the GP posts that WP trusts publications that have gone bananas. So your example speaks in favor of Wikipedia's reliability.
- tomrod 4y agoThat is not a citation. It's an appeal to generational bias, and fails miserably. Please provide an appropriate citation.
- specialist 4y agoIIRC, as an example, Newsweek lost its trusted status as it adopted a news tabloid format. Further, they no longer have fact checkers and do not print corrections. Surely that's a disqualification right there. Though I don't see that specific criteria listed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_guidelines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_guidelines FWIW, here's Wikipedia's roundup of sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
- tomrod 4y agoIf a news source loses reliability and wiki no longer uses it, how does that support the claim that wiki sources are bad?
- headsoup 4y agoDepends if it's true though, right? Let's not dismiss everything because culture wars.
- squeaky-clean 4y agoIf it's true there's probably a less controversial source that reported on it. If a controversial source is the only place to report on something, it's probably not true.
- headsoup 4y agoAnd the 'non-controversial' sources post only truth then? This is really un-critical logic being applied to news consumption.
- ars 4y agoYou clearly don't edit much of Wikipedia if you think that. Their bias actually toward things that are in the news. And since the news of today is only interested in the most extreme, that's the facts you'll find on Wikipedia. Truthfully a much worse problem is that an average user cannot edit on Wikipedia. To edit on Wikipedia you need to have an obsessive personality, to constantly guard your edits and keep other editors from removing them. And that bias is much worse than any other, you'll find a ton of information on matters that attract obsessive personalities, and much less on more normal subjects.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago> Truthfully a much worse problem is that an average user cannot edit on Wikipedia. To edit on Wikipedia you need to have an obsessive personality, to constantly guard your edits and keep other editors from removing them. This reads like something coming from the obsessive side.
- ars 4y agoI don't have patience to do any of that, and I'm mostly just gave up on editing Wikipedia. Every once in awhile I go to try to edit something and I'm reminded again how time-consuming it is.
- wongarsu 4y agoWikipedia certainly isn't infallible, and on some topics reading the talk page or comparing how the article reads in other languages can broaden your understanding or completely change it. But if that disqualifies Wikipedia as a "trusted source", which sources deserve that distinction?
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoThis is alarming but I'm not sure the study actually finds that "Wikipedia influences judicial behavior" in the way most readers would understand that term - influencing decisions and sentence. It finds that "Getting a public Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20 percent." That could mean judges are citing cases with wikipedia entries rather than similar cases without and their judicial behaviour remains the same.
- smrtinsert 4y agoWhy would it be alarming. Wikipedia is a fine entry into any topic. Seeing PragerU influencing the court would be alarming.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bacchusracine 4y agoSir, I'm afraid your bias is showing...
- Tostino 4y agoPretending PreagerU is anything but blatant propaganda is silly.
- theduder99 4y ago
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoPretending Wikipedia isn't also, is silly. This week's nonsense with the definition of 'recession' is proof enough of that. If you want to argue magnitude, you've already conceded what Wikipedia is (and I don't deny PragerU is what you claim it is).
- jbirer 4y agoAfter watching a female judge sentence a child with autism for killing his rapist and childhood abuser, after he was acquited by a male judge years before, I kind of lost faith in all types of judicial process. AI needs to take over for such things.
- jagged-chisel 4y agoThis goes against double jeopardy. Do you have a reference?
- jbirer 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2NZtcfqjDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2NZtcfqjDs Warning: it's very emotional
- morelisp 4y agoI believe "he was acquitted" refers to the abuser, not the killer.
- jagged-chisel 4y agoThis makes more sense than my reading.
- throwawy69690 4y ago
- aqme28 4y agoAn AI would be trained on human decisions, and unless we're careful it can easily have the same biases as human decision making.
- istinetz 4y agoat least some biases we can avoid. We can scrub the training data from mentioning gender or race. We can not include photos of people, to avoid the attractiveness halo effect.
- martin_drapeau 4y agoHow did clerks/lawyers find those articles on Wikipedia? Through Google I reckon. I wonder how bad/good the search is for court judgements of their existing system. Sounds like they need to put those court judgements online, or if they already are, do some SEO work so they rank. Wikipedia was a great way to do that.
- delecti 4y agoThere are legal search engines which just about every lawyer should have access to. Resorting to google or wikipedia seems like a weird intersection of being comfortable with technology but unaware of any of the standard options.
- laGrenouille 4y agoLexisNexis, which does other things now but started in the legal space, offers a huge collection of legal opinions with a fairly good search and linking capabilities. Most clerks and law professionals would have access to it. I think the benefit of Wikipedia is not access to materials so much as it is the succinct summarization of the legal opinions. Perhaps now NLP could help with this, but it's a very complicated problem to provide a summary of the important bits from a 100+ page legal document.
- bdowling 4y ago> ... the succinct summarization of the legal opinions. LexisNexis and Westlaw produce succinct summaries of legal opinions. That's the basis of their value, because the legal opinions themselves are not copyrighted. They also categorize everything about an opinion so that their database is searchable by area of law, etc.
- pojzon 4y agoLets check how google search results influence judicial behaviour. Ups we already know google creates echo chambers.
- jorgesborges 4y ago>Unsurprisingly, the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts... The researchers suspect 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. This makes sense. I don't know anything about the legal profession but they must have their own search tools and databases? Is it not easily accessible or digitized for all levels? I don't get why it would be easier in the first place to search Google or Wikipedia.
- gergov 4y agoyou would be surprised how the world operates outside of tech it's scary excel sheets and a lot of ducttape hell I wouldn't be surprised if the next round of innovation will be born out of tech people going into gov and realizing how much man hours there are to automate
- stevage 4y agoThat movement has been around a long time - see Code for America and its offshoots for example. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It's easy to think that new tech will fix everything but you need to understand the bureaucracy the tech resides within.
- _fat_santa 4y agoIf I had to bet, they have those systems but they are a pain to use. If I had to speculate, it would be a lot like those citation search sites you used in College, they simply didn’t have the usability of Google. You had to enter search terms very specifically, whereas with Google you just search for what you want and Google figures out how to structure the query best to give you the results you want. I can totally see a scenario where a clerk needs to look something up on a Friday afternoon, the though of pulling up the proper search catalog pains them so they shortcut, googling the thing they are looking for a reading the citations on Wikipedia. If I was a law clerk I would 100% do this.
- RaCaS123 4y ago
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis study should have been controlled by asking whether courts had access to the curated legal databases (primarily LexisNexis, I imagine): > "...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." Secondly, is it possible that the study designers themselves used LexisNexis to research their Wikipedia articles? The study design was based on: > "...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 these were randomly chosen to be uploaded online, where they could be used by judges, clerks, lawyers, and so on — the “treatment” group." If these Wikipedia articles were based on LexisNexis research, and that same LexisNexis database was being used by judges and clerks, this would seem to introduce some major biases (making the study rather worthless in terms of measuring Wikipedia influence).
- pushedx 4y agoThe 77 cases that were given a Wikipedia article saw a 17% increase in citations after publication. One significant outcome of giving a case a Wikipedia article described in the paper but not in the article is that the case receives an infobox visible at the top of search results for most search engines.
- whatshisface 4y agoMaybe there's a rising tide of interest in certain cases that lifts both Wikipedians and jurists.
- CrazyStat 4y agoCases were randomly selected to have Wikipedia write-ups posted about them or not. This is all in the article.
- wellbehaved 4y agoEverything is politicized and weaponized.
- pyuser583 4y agoA while ago the Oxford English Dictionary wrote a letter to the US Supreme Court asking them not use the OED as an authority. They said the OED definitions are based on imperfect collections of common use, and aren’t “right” or “wrong”. They also said the OED often uses SCOTUS decisions as a source, which creates an incestuous link.
- kemitchell 4y agoReally interesting. I searched for this online, but couldn't find it. Might you have a link handy? Much appreciated!
- notRobot 4y agoNot exactly what you're looking for, but a super interesting article from 2013 from the Oxford University Press's Blog: The highest dictionary in the land? https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/scotus-marriage-definition-dictionary/ https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/scotus-marriage-definition-dict...
- t_mann 4y agoPrevious discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053
- option 4y agoin other news, reading books and attending judicial classes and conferences influences judicial behavior
- DontchaKnowit 4y agoCan we stop calling stuff like this a "study"? This is not science, this is essentially journalism. I mean technically yes they are "studying" a subject but this is not a scientific experiment, but it will almost certainly be cited as such just because it's called a study.
- 6177c40f 4y agoWhat about it makes it not science?
- tediousdemise 4y agoConcluding that knowledge influences behavior isn't science. It's common sense.
- bdowling 4y agoA conclusion supported by carefully collected data is science. A conclusion based on common sense is not.
- stevage 4y agoThey quantified that though.
- edgyquant 4y agoYou have no idea what science is. Suggesting a hypothesis and then proving it via rigorous testing is what science means. It isn’t whatever the hell you want it to be nor is “science” anything but a method to disprove hypotheses.
- gwern 4y agoThis is definitely a study and science. It's actually a rather high quality experiment too, I was in awe of the way they carefully constructed the pairs of decisions to make them as identical as possible, and then got the same law student to write an article for each member of a pair before randomizing to ensure they were written as similarly as possible. Everyone knows that you should be blocking to maximize statistical power, but very few people ever go that far. (And that's probably a good part of why despite the relatively small _n_, they still get very clear causal effects.)
- dukeofdoom 4y agoJudges are biased, especially in political cases. Look at the joke of trial in Alex Jone's trial right now to see this. He's literally not allowed to plead his innocence to the jury. De facto ruling based on accusation of not turning over all the evidence. Biased judges like this, love circular reasoning, to find justifications. Hence why Wikipedia is useful. Keep in mind wikipedia change the definition of a recession recently, than when challanged changed the definition of definition. Just last week.
- tediousdemise 4y agoKnowledge influences behavior? No way, I don't believe it. Say I want to learn how to do a backflip. I do a quick search, find an instructional video, and nope the fuck out because of how dangerous and difficult it seems to perform. A prime example of knowledge that influenced my behavior. Pointless study since this is just common sense. So much time and money is wasted in science just so that people can make a name for themselves or get a promotion.
- stevage 4y agoTo me, the fact that Wikipedia influences law is surprising. I would not have expected judges or their clerks to rely on Wikipedia or a resource.
- TechBro8615 4y agoIt doesn’t seem unreasonable to extrapolate this finding to other areas of society where a small percentage of people write their opinions and then a much larger percent of people read them, eventually shaping aggregate opinion independently of any opinion held predominantly by “lurkers.” How many elections have been shaped by 4chan, Reddit, and Facebook comments? There have been a few studies on this, eg in 2016 [0] and 2018 [1] which found results that probably will not shock you. Personally, this might be confirmation/proximity bias, but I believe the effect of small internet communities is severely underestimated by the public and political consultants. This is an area that needs a lot more study, not so that we can stop it, but so we can raise public awareness of how memes spread and give people the tools to think critically without falling into the self-reinforcing cognitive traps that arise from filtering information with poor heuristics. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452 https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12512v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12512v1
- tediousdemise 4y ago> a small percentage of people write their opinions and then a much larger percent of people read them, eventually shaping aggregate opinion independently of any opinion held predominantly by “lurkers.” ELI5 brainwashing
- asdff 4y agoThis is a repost from three days ago (190pts, 107 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053
- mikotodomo 4y agoWikipedia is an amazing wonder of the internet. I could spend ten hours a day reading deep into topics and related topics I only learned because of the initial curiosity I had. But that's beside the point. There is such thorough coverage of all topics of every field so I would indeed expect that judges are using it to look things up because of how convenient it is.
- mellosouls 4y agoThe problem is that in certain subjects (especially those with a potential ethical dimension like social and cultural pages) there is significant bias towards the left (I say that as a left-leaning person). That's not healthy at all when being used as a resource without awareness and significant caution.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 4y agoOn HN front page 4 days ago, with 190 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253053
- mch82 4y agoCurious what people think about the ethics of this study? The researchers describe running an experiment on the public without opt-in consent. They also describe allowing an algorithm to do the editing. That raises questions about the kind of edits the algorithm made, how the edits influenced case outcomes, and if/how the research team will clean up Wikipedia now that they’ve concluded the study. Are there professional guidelines that suggest how experiments like this should be conducted? Do any regulations exist to protect people who get exposed to information as a result of an experiment like this?
- wheelinsupial 4y agoThere is a paragraph on this in the publicly accessible pre-print [1] of the article. "Approved by the respective ethics boards of MIT and Maynooth University, the experiment amounted to a friendly stress-test of the potential vulnerability of judicial legal reasoning to the limitations of reliance on Wikipedia, notably, its ad hoc topic coverage and unknown author/editorship. The experiment featured Wikipedia entries authored by faculty and by law students under faculty supervision, who each had access, through their university library, to all the relevant primary and secondary legal materials available to judges and their clerks. This assurance of accuracy and of informed analysis in the content of the entries—though short of that offered by a specialist textbook—indicates that judges or lawyers would be unlikely to be misled by what they might read. However, as the authorship of Wikipedia articles is opaque, this fact would not be known to any legal professional when using them. From the users’ perspective, there was no particular reason to imagine that the creators of the relevant entry had any legal expertise—or even that they lacked an ulterior agenda." I'm curious where I missed the part about the algorithm did the editing? I don't see any matches for "algo" when I control + f the article. "Algo" doesn't appear in the article either. The excerpted paragraph says who wrote the entries and it wasn't an algorithm. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4174200 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4174200
- mch82 4y agoThanks. You summarized the paper better than the article this discussion thread is about. On closer reading, CSAIL had people write the articles and used natural language processing to detect “linguistic fingerprints of the Wikipedia articles that they’d created”.
- kazinator 4y agoIs that necessarily bad? A best-case-scenario example of influenced judicial behavior is that a judge is about to make a bad decision, but then is informed in some way by an excellent, well-referenced Wikipedia article.