Study finds Wikipedia influences judicial behavior
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
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.
Also the causality of the argument in the linked article seems clearly backwards anyway: it's not that "Getting a wikipedia page for your case makes it more likely to be cited", it's "More important/citable cases are more likely to have a wikipedia page". Which is sort of an obvious point.
Wikipedia is quite unreliable on any major legal case, controversial issue, political personality, corporate entity etc., as the relevant wikipedia pages end up being heavily manipulated by agenda-driven editors who often erase or alter the most important information.
There are left-wing equivalents of PragerU (ex: the Gravel Institute) that are just as far away from Wikipedia as PragerU is.
If you get into the political area's of wikipeda, I think the bias of Wikipedia is pretty clear polar to that of PragerU.
If you stick to the pure hard sciences (physics as an example) and non-controversial events (like an earthquake) then sure they are unbiased
For example:
> Mohammed Zakir (also known as Meyra) was an Ethiopian Oromo nationalist. Regarded as "legendary Oromo hero", he is noted for his high contribution to keep the lights of Oromo nationalism shining after the martyrdom of his two hero colleagues called Elemo Qiltu and Ahmad Taqi ... the Oromos would never forget this early exemplary hero. And above all, history will always remember Meyra and his heroism.
At least in the English speaking world, this person seems to be a nobody and nobody seems to care enough to fix this article. Honestly, someone that knows how the process works on Wikipedia more than me should probably submit it for deletion, as this (at least in my opinion) shouldn't even meet Wikipedia's notability standards.
> The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture.
I feel like a lot of actual marxists would disagree with this statement. People like Antonio Gramsci, who basically laid the foundations for cultural marxism in the early 20th century.
Oddly, if you read about Antonio Gramsci on wikipedia, they all but call him a cultural marxist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
> Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies.
Also, the last time I looked at the cultural marxism article, it simply said a "far-right conspiracy theory". Now they've somehow managed to roll up antisemitism in there too. Apparently it became antisemitic in just the past year or two!
> Also, the last time I looked at the cultural marxism article, it simply said a "far-right conspiracy theory". Now they've somehow managed to roll up antisemitism in there too. Apparently it became antisemitic in just the past year or two!
This is the first ever revision of the article that isn't simply a redirect, and it contains the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cultural_Marxism_...
This is all present in Gramsci's prison notebooks[1] and is common knowledge to anyone who has ever studied marxist intellectual literature at any length. I find it ridiculous that wikipedia would claim this is a "conspiracy theory". Marxists speak about this _very_ candidly in their writings.
Again, to be clear: I am not asking for proof that Marxists promoted Marxism (obviously they did), but that they did so "to subvert Western culture".
edit: I'll also point out that Mao's cultural revolution in China was the first implementation of Gramsci's vision of cultural marxism. There's no way to know whether Mao had ever read Gramsci, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
I think you're just looking for the pretty different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_cultural_analysis with that description.
Regardless of belief, and I’m by no means a right winger, do you not see how this will sway the opinion of anyone who googled the term cultural Marxism?
Capital C, capital M "Cultural Marxism" and "Marxist theory being applied to culture" are two different things.
As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda actually link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_studies? There are gender studies academics who work to normalize gay and trans people within popular culture (sorry, "establish[ing] a counter-hegemony within the existing cultural hegemony, thereby subverting it"). Saying that any gender theory being applied to culture should be categorized under the gay agenda would still be a category error.
Yet another issue that mass information has created that solutions haven’t yet come up with.
>As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda actually link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_studies?
This is not even close to a parallel scenario and borders on bad faith.
I only see
> "Cultural Marxism" redirects here. For "cultural Marxism" in the context of social theory and cultural studies, see Marxist cultural analysis.
and "Marxist cultural analysis" is definitely linked.
>> As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda actually link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_studies?
> This is not even close to a parallel scenario and borders on bad faith.
Conflating a specific set of accusations of supposed degeneracy eating away at the base of western culture with a wider academic discipline that includes studying/discussing said "degeneracy" seems appropriate to me but maybe you can be more specific about why you think they aren't parallel?
To be clear: you realize you're paraphrasing Gramsci, not quoting me, right?
It's been there as long as the article has (almost two years)[1] and was on the Frankfurt School subsection on the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory for the last 3.5 years[2], so you've off by a while there.
Even before that you can read about how "blacks, students, feminist women, and homosexuals" are the vanguard but its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school, apparently peddled at, for instance, a Holocaust denial conference 20 years ago[3]. I'm not an expert on the subject but doesn't seem recent or much of a stretch to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cultural_Marxism_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School&...
[3] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
Yes. This was already pointed out. I was mistaken about the antisemitic part not being there earlier.
> its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school
I would have said its criticism is rooted in the fact that Mao rose to power through cultural subversion and is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
> apparently peddled at, for instance, a Holocaust denial conference 20 years ago
Interesting that is brought up. To deny the existence of cultural marxism, IMO, is akin to holocaust denial.
> I would have said its criticism is rooted in the fact that Mao rose to power through cultural subversion and is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
It seems like maybe you're just hung up on definitions and/or the inclusion of "cultural" here? It sounds a lot like you're just looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Marxism and its various offshoots.
The wikipedia article for a specific set of critiques of Marxism from a bunch of racists is not a good base article for a general/systematic critique of Marxism.
I don't think so, but I suppose I could call it "marxism which incorporates cultural subversion" if it makes you feel better. Bit of a mouth-full though.
> The wikipedia article for a specific set of critiques of Marxism from a bunch of racists is not a good base article for the general critique of Marxism.
Glad we agree. The article is definitely not a good base for anything, as it ignores the legitimate critiques of cultural marxism and instead makes it out to be a racist conspiracy theory. Seems biased in favor of marxism, wouldn't you say?
Or just go with the wikipedia convention of "criticism of X"?
> Glad we agree. The article is definitely not a good base for anything, as it ignores the legitimate critiques of cultural marxism and instead makes it out to be a racist conspiracy theory. Seems biased in favor of marxism, wouldn't you say?
"Cultural Marxism" is a racist conspiracy theory.
Your argument appears to just be that marxism and marxism activism is inherently cultural (sure), therefore an existing use of the words "cultural" and "marxism" should be banished to some other name so that an article that already exists and already has a different name can be called "cultural marxism" instead.
edgyquant has a stronger argument about people like Jordan Peterson inadvisably adopting that term so usage is shifting over time. I could see that continuing and the article changing to a disambiguation page some day, though from your mention of Mao, I don't think you'd be satisfied with edgyquant's preferred redirect to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_cultural_analysis
As if. This article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question is still up despite having almost zero pertinent sources.[1] Calling that "polar" is nothing short of a stretch.
At most, Wikipedia could be said to have a neo-liberal bias, an ideology upheld by both of the US' political parties, based on policies alone and not on each individual voter's personal and nuanced adherence. The parties are wrongly assumed to be polar opposites on the political spectrum by most US citizens, but they're not.
It isn't, that's the point of the study - not all court decisions are on wikipedia and those that are, are getting cited more. Judges, Lawyers, Clerks have access to the original decisions and court transcripts in electronic form going back decades and longer. If they're relying on whats on wikipedia - they're either doing poor research or are too lazy to write their own summations.
The point of judges is that they make judgements. The citing of other law is just to try and keep some consistency between the judgements to make them predictable. In theory they could even give out inconsistent judgements and that would also be workable, it just happens that it usually means something bad is happening because judges aren't naturally more pleasant people than the horrible Mass of Humans that causes so much grief. So we want judges to put in an effort at consistency and if they are consistently using Wikipedia as a reference then it is easier for the rest of us to guess what the system is about to do.
It is easy to influence judicial opinion on a case. There are even professionals hired to do it as a full time job! We call them lawyers.
While I think the study has some major deficiencies addressed in other comments, if it was true, the alarm for me would be that Wikipedia has clearly become politically partisan in many area's and topics, including some that would intersect the law
Wikipedia is hardly a "neutral" site of just facts
I’m not saying there isn’t bias, but the existence of bias in certain controversial subjects isn’t necessarily evidence that articles about cases are subject to the same kinds of issues. I’m not saying they’re immune either, but it’s not clear that the two are related.
And if Wikipedia does, you can bet Google does too.
Not a particularly surprising result, but it shows how much of an effect such a little thing can have, and how big of an influence for example controlling what articles published vs not published could have over time.
> "...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).
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.
This is all in the article.
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.
I searched for this online, but couldn't find it. Might you have a link handy? Much appreciated!
The highest dictionary in the land? https://blog.oup.com/2013/06/scotus-marriage-definition-dict...
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.
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.
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
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.
ELI5 brainwashing
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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
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.
That's not healthy at all when being used as a resource without awareness and significant caution.
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.
It also helps the ethics angle if you are simply holding back articles which you will upload eventually.
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.
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.
Please provide an appropriate citation.
Though I don't see that specific criteria listed:
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/Per...
This is really un-critical logic being applied to news consumption.
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.
This reads like something coming from the obsessive side.
Every once in awhile I go to try to edit something and I'm reminded again how time-consuming it is.
But if that disqualifies Wikipedia as a "trusted source", which sources deserve that distinction?
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.
Warning: it's very emotional
You're really misrepresenting the case, and I doubt a good AI would rule favorably on those circumstances. The judicial system doesn't tend to go easy on stabbing defenseless people to death, even if you can argue that they were bad people or otherwise deserved it.