Ireland: Fresh fuel poured on debate over Wikipedia influence on judgments

The original research paper, published in summer 2022, presented the researchers’ findings that creating a Wikipedia page for a Supreme Court case led to a 25 per cent increase in judicial citations.

Judges ridiculed the findings and claimed to have been exonerated a year later when a rival research paper highlighted what it said were flaws in the original work.

The row has now been reignited by the original research team, who have published a fresh rebuttal to their critics.

They say the critical paper reads “more like legal submissions than social science” and accuse the authors of making “sweeping dismissals of our analysis” without doing “the research needed to show whether their objections would undercut our arguments”.

“In this rejoinder, we do the leg work for them and show that their concerns are ill-founded; indeed, this work confirms the robustness of our findings,” they continue.

The 14-page paper insists that Wikipedia pages do have an effect on judgment and points the finger directly at judges and their assistants, saying the effect could not be caused by lawyers and their submissions alone.

It concludes: “For all the reasons above, we stand by our conclusions on Wikipedia’s effect on judgments and look forward to more experiments that help us understand judicial reasoning.”

The researchers in question are Neil C. Thompson of MIT; Dr Brian Flanagan, Dr Edana Richardson and Dr Brian McKenzie of Maynooth; and Xueyun Luo of Cornell University.