Friday, April 6, 2007
Courts Citing to Wikipedia
As I was reading COA's decision in Frost v Minnesota Life Insurance Co, I noted the court's citation to DSM-IV (the leading diagnostic treatise for mental disorders). That citation made me recall another case where the Michigan Supreme Court cited to Wikipedia to define a psychological term. In MDOT v Haggerty Corridor, Justice Young relied on Wikipedia to define a psychological phenomenon known as "hindsight bias" (see note 36 of the opinion). In Justice Young's defense, the case had nothing to do psychology; instead he was making an analogy. But it seems that the courts are more willing to cite to Wikipedia, and presumably so are the litigants before them. It seems dangerous to rely on a "source" that can be edited by anyone at any time, regardless of accuracy of the post or expertise of the poster.
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3 comments:
Using Wikipedia sounds unnecessary at best in this case. Fortunately, it was just in the dicta. If Wikipedia were used for something more substantive, I would be worried. To me, this sounds symptomatic of a lazy clerk.
I would feel better about this citation if the judge didn't write that the phrase was used "[i]n the world of psychology." Wikipedia is not an appropriate citation for psychology, although in this case it would be appropriate if the judge had used the citation definitionally. Still, it IS lazy.
It could be a lazy clerk. What I recall from law school, writing one of those papers you need to cite everything including proof that the sky is blue, is that sometimes you'd just have some bit of knowledge that you personally knew, but then you had to find some cite for it, so you grab something off of the web but really that wasn't your source, your brain was your source.
Of course, your brain can be wrong, too, even if you did manage to find a reasonable source to back it up. So that could be what happened here.
Another thing about Wikipedia - while it is editable by anyone, even if you put nonsense in there, it usually gets corrected pretty quickly by the editors.
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