Wikipedia was under siege recently from a right-wing campaign focused on its article about recessions. Isn’t it convenient, these critics said, that the online encyclopedia doesn’t clearly define a recession as two quarters of negative growth? Wikipedia must be taking its orders from the Biden administration, they claimed, which insists that though the U.S. economy has had two negative quarters, it is not in a recession because of other, more positive economic indicators, including low unemployment. The truth was that the Wikipedia article had always reflected different definitions of a recession — some, like the one Britain uses, based solely on two quarters of negative growth; others, like the United States’ preferred definition, based on economists’ assessment of a variety of factors. That didn’t stop angry readers from trying to rewrite the article.
Wikipedia’s administrators — community-elected volunteers who control how an article can be edited — rejected those readers’ demands as unsourced and then “locked down” the article so only established editors could make a change, which just helped feed the conspiracy theories. Fox News personality Sean Hannity sent out a blog post’s headline on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social network: “Wikipedia Changes Definition of Recession and Then Locks Page.” Elon Musk tweeted at Jimmy Wales, the co-founder and public face of the project: “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity.” Wales pointed Musk to an explanation of what happened, adding, “Reading too much Twitter nonsense is making you stupid.”
This fight over whether the United States is in a recession is striking because of the lofty status it confers on Wikipedia as an objective truth-teller. Here are people who have convinced themselves that the government is lying to them, and they turn to a collaborative encyclopedia to be assured that they are right, like settling a bar bet with the Guinness World Records or checking a proposed word in Scrabble with Merriam-Webster.
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Now comes a new paper from MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland offering yet more evidence of Wikipedia’s elevated status, finding that judges routinely rely on its articles not just for background information but for core legal reasoning and specific language they use in their decisions.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but exceedingly rare is the judge who openly credits Wikipedia, so how could the researchers say confidently that judges were relying on it? How to prove not just correlation (it sure seems like the judge was using Wikipedia) but causality (this decision could have been written this way only after the judge read Wikipedia)?
One way might be to introduce a subtle error that serves as a marker — if a party in a case has a strange, made-up middle name that appears only in the Wikipedia article and then appears in a judge’s decision, the evidence would seem pretty clear. (Cartographers trying to prevent their maps from being copied have been known to make up a street name to catch the guilty party.) However, researchers didn’t want to introduce an error on purpose. Maybe you could examine the judges’ computers for the sites they visited, or conduct interviews? But the legal system isn’t exactly a Petri dish, designed for close study without hindrance. Instead, researchers proved the connection through a randomized control experiment, with the judges of Ireland their unwitting test subjects.
Beginning in early 2019 and continuing through early 2020, law professors and their students at Maynooth were tasked with preparing for publication 154 Wikipedia articles on influential Irish Supreme Court decisions; fortunately, only nine such Wikipedia articles existed at the time. Each author would be assigned a pair of articles. An experienced Wikipedia editor guided half the articles (one from each pair) onto the platform, letting curious fellow editors know that the mass introduction of articles came through the university. Researchers took great pains to add formatting to the articles so that Google and other search engines would quickly notice. The rest of the articles were held back from publication. “The only difference between them is one of them gets put on Wikipedia and one of them doesn’t, and then you just wait,” said Neil C. Thompson, a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and lead author of the study.
Conspiracy videos? Fake news? Enter Wikipedia, the ‘good cop’ of the Internet
The researchers reported that the 77 published articles instantly found an audience, receiving a total of 56,733 views through Jan. 16 of this year. Analyzing court decisions written after the new articles were published, they detected a statistically significant pattern. The Supreme Court decisions with Wikipedia articles saw a 20 percent increase in the number of times they were cited by judges, as compared to the cases whose Wikipedia articles were held back. All of that increase came from lower-level judges, whom the paper’s authors presumed were overburdened and lacking the time and resources to do formal legal research. In addition, the researchers found in decisions a similar spike in the use of certain words and phrases that first appeared in the Wikipedia articles — another way of demonstrating causality.
The paper doesn’t offer details on how cases were decided. There is no example of a decision that was particularly indebted to a certain Wikipedia article. And the authors take pains to say they didn’t find an example of a case being wrongly decided — they stand by the accuracy of the articles they published. They instead wanted to prove the ubiquity of Wikipedia in our lives, what they call “knowledge on tap.”
doesn’t write about it, did it happen?
Wikipedia’s administrators — community-elected volunteers who control how an article can be edited — rejected those readers’ demands as unsourced and then “locked down” the article so only established editors could make a change, which just helped feed the conspiracy theories. Fox News personality Sean Hannity sent out a blog post’s headline on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social network: “Wikipedia Changes Definition of Recession and Then Locks Page.” Elon Musk tweeted at Jimmy Wales, the co-founder and public face of the project: “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity.” Wales pointed Musk to an explanation of what happened, adding, “Reading too much Twitter nonsense is making you stupid.”
This fight over whether the United States is in a recession is striking because of the lofty status it confers on Wikipedia as an objective truth-teller. Here are people who have convinced themselves that the government is lying to them, and they turn to a collaborative encyclopedia to be assured that they are right, like settling a bar bet with the Guinness World Records or checking a proposed word in Scrabble with Merriam-Webster.
ADVERTISING
Now comes a new paper from MIT and Maynooth University in Ireland offering yet more evidence of Wikipedia’s elevated status, finding that judges routinely rely on its articles not just for background information but for core legal reasoning and specific language they use in their decisions.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but exceedingly rare is the judge who openly credits Wikipedia, so how could the researchers say confidently that judges were relying on it? How to prove not just correlation (it sure seems like the judge was using Wikipedia) but causality (this decision could have been written this way only after the judge read Wikipedia)?
One way might be to introduce a subtle error that serves as a marker — if a party in a case has a strange, made-up middle name that appears only in the Wikipedia article and then appears in a judge’s decision, the evidence would seem pretty clear. (Cartographers trying to prevent their maps from being copied have been known to make up a street name to catch the guilty party.) However, researchers didn’t want to introduce an error on purpose. Maybe you could examine the judges’ computers for the sites they visited, or conduct interviews? But the legal system isn’t exactly a Petri dish, designed for close study without hindrance. Instead, researchers proved the connection through a randomized control experiment, with the judges of Ireland their unwitting test subjects.
Beginning in early 2019 and continuing through early 2020, law professors and their students at Maynooth were tasked with preparing for publication 154 Wikipedia articles on influential Irish Supreme Court decisions; fortunately, only nine such Wikipedia articles existed at the time. Each author would be assigned a pair of articles. An experienced Wikipedia editor guided half the articles (one from each pair) onto the platform, letting curious fellow editors know that the mass introduction of articles came through the university. Researchers took great pains to add formatting to the articles so that Google and other search engines would quickly notice. The rest of the articles were held back from publication. “The only difference between them is one of them gets put on Wikipedia and one of them doesn’t, and then you just wait,” said Neil C. Thompson, a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and lead author of the study.
Conspiracy videos? Fake news? Enter Wikipedia, the ‘good cop’ of the Internet
The researchers reported that the 77 published articles instantly found an audience, receiving a total of 56,733 views through Jan. 16 of this year. Analyzing court decisions written after the new articles were published, they detected a statistically significant pattern. The Supreme Court decisions with Wikipedia articles saw a 20 percent increase in the number of times they were cited by judges, as compared to the cases whose Wikipedia articles were held back. All of that increase came from lower-level judges, whom the paper’s authors presumed were overburdened and lacking the time and resources to do formal legal research. In addition, the researchers found in decisions a similar spike in the use of certain words and phrases that first appeared in the Wikipedia articles — another way of demonstrating causality.
The paper doesn’t offer details on how cases were decided. There is no example of a decision that was particularly indebted to a certain Wikipedia article. And the authors take pains to say they didn’t find an example of a case being wrongly decided — they stand by the accuracy of the articles they published. They instead wanted to prove the ubiquity of Wikipedia in our lives, what they call “knowledge on tap.”
doesn’t write about it, did it happen?