The Irish Times published a story about Wikipedia influencing legal judgments, spurring a handful of news stories about the free online encyclopedia’s influence over the courts and the vague sentiment that the justice system is devolving into some half-assed homework assignment copied from Wikipedia.
In reality, the study, led by MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researcher Neil Thompson, hasn’t even been published yet (though a preprint is available). Its methodology is pretty interesting, and the authors say it’s “the first randomized field experiment undertaken in this area.”
