The research aimed to uncover how much legal influence the crowdsourced site holds.
released Thursday. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cornell University, and Maynooth University in Ireland came to that conclusion after conducting a randomized field experiment that analyzed the impact of Wikipedia articles on the Irish legal system.
“To our knowledge, this is the first randomized field experiment that investigates the influence of legal sources on judicial behavior,”said the paper’s lead author, MIT researcher Neil Thompson, in a . “And because randomized experiments are the gold standard for this type of research, we know the effect we are seeing is causation, not just correlation.”how scientific articles on Wikipedia influenced academic literature on the subject. His work caught the eye of Brian McKenzie, an associate professor at Maynooth University, who suggested to Thompson that they conduct a similar study on judicial influence.
Their hypothesis is that judges with heavier workloads are likely turning to Wikipedia in a pinch to help them research cases related to those on their dockets. “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,” ThompsonThompson added that this presents an “important public policy issue” since the crowdsourced nature of Wikipedia presents a potential for