Academia by Speculation: Debunking the Flawed Science behind the Claim that Wikipedia Influences Judges

Abstract

Thompson et al (2022) have postulated that Irish court cases that have been made the subject of Wikipedia articles are cited more frequently as a result, specifically by the High Court. They attribute some of this alleged increase in citation to direct consultation of Wikipedia by Irish judges. The evidence we examined supports the conclusion that Wikipedia has no material effect on the citation of cases by Irish judges in judgments, and that the vast majority of citations are attributable to the written and oral submissions of the parties and to materials referred to in such submissions. The alleged textual similarity between judgments and Wikipedia does not stand up to scrutiny. We conclude that the conclusions of the original paper are unreliable, because the paper’s assumptions and understandings of judgment production are palpably flawed, its conclusions are speculative and inconsistent with objective facts, its methodology is clearly defective, and its authors’ interpretations are unsustainable. We consider that the original paper should now be regarded as discredited and should either be retracted, rejected for publication or be required to be subjected to major revision.

Keywords: Wikipedia, judges, Ireland, scientific method, bad science, statistics, judgments

JEL Classification: K41