This is alarming but I'm not sure the study actually finds that "Wikipedia influences judicial behavior" in the way most readers would understand that term - influencing decisions and sentence.
It finds that "Getting a public Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20 percent." That could mean judges are citing cases with wikipedia entries rather than similar cases without and their judicial behaviour remains the same.
I think law clerks and other legal professionals would be using a curated service (most likely LexisNexis) as their primary information source, not Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is quite unreliable on any major legal case, controversial issue, political personality, corporate entity etc., as the relevant wikipedia pages end up being heavily manipulated by agenda-driven editors who often erase or alter the most important information.
I would guess that google and other search engines have much better search functionality than curated services. You'd find a case via google, then review the details on a curated service.
Exactly, Wikipedia is the first step for almost every expert professional in every profession. We all do it, and the world is better for it.
Also the causality of the argument in the linked article seems clearly backwards anyway: it's not that "Getting a wikipedia page for your case makes it more likely to be cited", it's "More important/citable cases are more likely to have a wikipedia page". Which is sort of an obvious point.
The linked article is describing a randomised trial, which looks like it was set up in a way that's good enough to be sure the causality goes in the former direction.
It isn't that obvious that this is alarming. What are we alarmed about?
The point of judges is that they make judgements. The citing of other law is just to try and keep some consistency between the judgements to make them predictable. In theory they could even give out inconsistent judgements and that would also be workable, it just happens that it usually means something bad is happening because judges aren't naturally more pleasant people than the horrible Mass of Humans that causes so much grief. So we want judges to put in an effort at consistency and if they are consistently using Wikipedia as a reference then it is easier for the rest of us to guess what the system is about to do.
It is easy to influence judicial opinion on a case. There are even professionals hired to do it as a full time job! We call them lawyers.
The part that concerns ('alarm' implies surprise) me is the confirmation that activist wikipedians have levers and knobs to play with that impact court decisions.
And if Wikipedia does, you can bet Google does too.
Seems to me that any concern here is more around case discovery. Whether judges learn about cases from Wikipedia, Lexis Nexus, university publications, etc there is always a bias in which cases get surfaced. Wikipedia being more open than most other venues can be good (more contributors/diversity of viewpoints, easier to critique) or bad (more potentially unsophisticated/ignorant contributions). I tend to bias toward more open platforms given the choice.
While I think the study has some major deficiencies addressed in other comments, if it was true, the alarm for me would be that Wikipedia has clearly become politically partisan in many area's and topics, including some that would intersect the law
Wikipedia is hardly a "neutral" site of just facts
Do those have topics have anything to do with the class of Wikipedia article mentioned in the study?
I’m not saying there isn’t bias, but the existence of bias in certain controversial subjects isn’t necessarily evidence that articles about cases are subject to the same kinds of issues. I’m not saying they’re immune either, but it’s not clear that the two are related.
But that is what influencing is. By definition, these results show that cases given Wikipedia articles exert an otherwise unproportional influence on the legal landscape.
Not a particularly surprising result, but it shows how much of an effect such a little thing can have, and how big of an influence for example controlling what articles published vs not published could have over time.
It isn't, that's the point of the study - not all court decisions are on wikipedia and those that are, are getting cited more. Judges, Lawyers, Clerks have access to the original decisions and court transcripts in electronic form going back decades and longer. If they're relying on whats on wikipedia - they're either doing poor research or are too lazy to write their own summations.
... and then rely on LexisNexis et al.? Unfortunately it seems that (US) courts don't really have a good collation of cases (as opposed to collated laws which exists as the US Code).
Pretending Wikipedia isn't also, is silly. This week's nonsense with the definition of 'recession' is proof enough of that. If you want to argue magnitude, you've already conceded what Wikipedia is (and I don't deny PragerU is what you claim it is).
Wikipedia is not perfectly unbiased, but if you honestly believe it is even comparable to PragerU you should seriously talk to someone about your biases and perception of the world.
There are left-wing equivalents of PragerU (ex: the Gravel Institute) that are just as far away from Wikipedia as PragerU is.
The method of this study was to deliberately construct a bias on wikipedia, which the researchers were able to successfully pull off with measurable effect.
> Mohammed Zakir (also known as Meyra) was an Ethiopian Oromo nationalist. Regarded as "legendary Oromo hero", he is noted for his high contribution to keep the lights of Oromo nationalism shining after the martyrdom of his two hero colleagues called Elemo Qiltu and Ahmad Taqi ... the Oromos would never forget this early exemplary hero. And above all, history will always remember Meyra and his heroism.
If you go to the page in question (available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Zakir_Meyra) it has not one but two warnings at the top of the page about the content within. Is this not an example of Wikipedia's process working as intended?
Wikipedia runs off of community contributions. This person seems to be extremely obscure, as searching the full name 'Mohammed Zakir Meyra' I found this Wikipedia article, websites that scrape Wikipedia and post its contents, and garbage SEO-optimized websites that had nothing to do with the person. I gave up trying to find anything that wasn't SEO garbage or a Wikipedia scrape on page 5 of the search results.
At least in the English speaking world, this person seems to be a nobody and nobody seems to care enough to fix this article. Honestly, someone that knows how the process works on Wikipedia more than me should probably submit it for deletion, as this (at least in my opinion) shouldn't even meet Wikipedia's notability standards.
> The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture.
I feel like a lot of actual marxists would disagree with this statement. People like Antonio Gramsci, who basically laid the foundations for cultural marxism in the early 20th century.
> Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies.
Also, the last time I looked at the cultural marxism article, it simply said a "far-right conspiracy theory". Now they've somehow managed to roll up antisemitism in there too. Apparently it became antisemitic in just the past year or two!
> Also, the last time I looked at the cultural marxism article, it simply said a "far-right conspiracy theory". Now they've somehow managed to roll up antisemitism in there too. Apparently it became antisemitic in just the past year or two!
It's been there as long as the article has (almost two years)[1] and was on the Frankfurt School subsection on the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory for the last 3.5 years[2], so you've off by a while there.
Even before that you can read about how "blacks, students, feminist women, and homosexuals" are the vanguard but its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school, apparently peddled at, for instance, a Holocaust denial conference 20 years ago[3]. I'm not an expert on the subject but doesn't seem recent or much of a stretch to me.
> It's been there as long as the article has (almost two years)[1]
Yes. This was already pointed out. I was mistaken about the antisemitic part not being there earlier.
> its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school
I would have said its criticism is rooted in the fact that Mao rose to power through cultural subversion and is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
> apparently peddled at, for instance, a Holocaust denial conference 20 years ago
Interesting that is brought up. To deny the existence of cultural marxism, IMO, is akin to holocaust denial.
>> its roots are in the anti-semitic criticism of the Frankfurt school
> I would have said its criticism is rooted in the fact that Mao rose to power through cultural subversion and is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
It seems like maybe you're just hung up on definitions and/or the inclusion of "cultural" here? It sounds a lot like you're just looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Marxism and its various offshoots.
The wikipedia article for a specific set of critiques of Marxism from a bunch of racists is not a good base article for a general/systematic critique of Marxism.
> It seems like maybe you're just hung up on definitions and/or the inclusion of "cultural" here?
I don't think so, but I suppose I could call it "marxism which incorporates cultural subversion" if it makes you feel better. Bit of a mouth-full though.
> The wikipedia article for a specific set of critiques of Marxism from a bunch of racists is not a good base article for the general critique of Marxism.
Glad we agree. The article is definitely not a good base for anything, as it ignores the legitimate critiques of cultural marxism and instead makes it out to be a racist conspiracy theory. Seems biased in favor of marxism, wouldn't you say?
> I don't think so, but I suppose I could call it "marxism which incorporate
s cultural subversion" if it makes you feel better. Bit of a mouth-full though.
Or just go with the wikipedia convention of "criticism of X"?
> Glad we agree. The article is definitely not a good base for anything, as it ignores the legitimate critiques of cultural marxism and instead makes it out to be a racist conspiracy theory. Seems biased in favor of marxism, wouldn't you say?
"Cultural Marxism" is a racist conspiracy theory.
Your argument appears to just be that marxism and marxism activism is inherently cultural (sure), therefore an existing use of the words "cultural" and "marxism" should be banished to some other name so that an article that already exists and already has a different name can be called "cultural marxism" instead.
edgyquant has a stronger argument about people like Jordan Peterson inadvisably adopting that term so usage is shifting over time. I could see that continuing and the article changing to a disambiguation page some day, though from your mention of Mao, I don't think you'd be satisfied with edgyquant's preferred redirect to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_cultural_analysis
Just because they use the term "cultural" on Anotonio Gramsci's page doesn't make him part of "continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture". Can you substantiate that claim, or is that just made up?
> Also, the last time I looked at the cultural marxism article, it simply said a "far-right conspiracy theory". Now they've somehow managed to roll up antisemitism in there too. Apparently it became antisemitic in just the past year or two!
Antonio Gramsci asserted that the reason Marx's predictions of late-stage capitalism never came to fruition was due to cultural institutions propping up capitalism. He states very clearly that the (new) objective of marxism should be to establish a counter-hegemony within the existing cultural hegemony, thereby subverting it.
This is all present in Gramsci's prison notebooks[1] and is common knowledge to anyone who has ever studied marxist intellectual literature at any length. I find it ridiculous that wikipedia would claim this is a "conspiracy theory". Marxists speak about this _very_ candidly in their writings.
This still does not provide any proof for the claim. Of course Marxists want to promote their ideology, even culturally. Nobody denies this. The claim made by people using the term "Cultural Marxism", and the reason it is a conspiracy theory, is that said Marxists do so for the purpose of destroying Western culture.
Again, to be clear: I am not asking for proof that Marxists promoted Marxism (obviously they did), but that they did so "to subvert Western culture".
Again, Gramsci and later followers of Gramsci advocated infiltrating cultural institutions and establishing a counter-hegemony to subvert the existing cultural hegemony. That should be enough to satisfy anyone's definition of cultural marxism. Read Gramsci or any other cultural marxist if you want proof.
edit: I'll also point out that Mao's cultural revolution in China was the first implementation of Gramsci's vision of cultural marxism. There's no way to know whether Mao had ever read Gramsci, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
Proof of what claim dude? That actual Marxist have cultural theories and thus the term “cultural Marxism” is a description of things other than a conspiracy theory? I’m not sure what you’re arguing against at this point.
Right, the point is that the main article links only to the conspiracy theory and not that article. If it linked to that article people hearing e.g. Jordan Peterson use the term and then googling might be given a history of Marxist theory being applied to culture. Instead they see only that it’s an anti-Semitic right wing conspiracy theory. It’s made worse by the fact that “Marxist cultural analysis” is mentioned in the second paragraph on the “main” conspiracy page but not as a link.
Regardless of belief, and I’m by no means a right winger, do you not see how this will sway the opinion of anyone who googled the term cultural Marxism?
> If it linked to that article people hearing e.g. Jordan Peterson use the term and then googling might be given a history of Marxist theory being applied to culture. Instead they see only that it’s an anti-Semitic right wing conspiracy theory
Capital C, capital M "Cultural Marxism" and "Marxist theory being applied to culture" are two different things.
As a parallel, should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_agenda actually link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_studies? There are gender studies academics who work to normalize gay and trans people within popular culture (sorry, "establish[ing] a counter-hegemony within the existing cultural hegemony, thereby subverting it"). Saying that any gender theory being applied to culture should be categorized under the gay agenda would still be a category error.
The real theory page, Marxist cultural analysis, is mentioned by name in the first paragraph of the conspiracy but not linked. I don’t know how wide spread this is on Wikipedia but there are a few of these examples that are very concerning and if our court system is utilizing it as suggested that is a worry.
Yet another issue that mass information has created that solutions haven’t yet come up with.
> This is not even close to a parallel scenario and borders on bad faith.
Conflating a specific set of accusations of supposed degeneracy eating away at the base of western culture with a wider academic discipline that includes studying/discussing said "degeneracy" seems appropriate to me but maybe you can be more specific about why you think they aren't parallel?
At most, Wikipedia could be said to have a neo-liberal bias, an ideology upheld by both of the US' political parties, based on policies alone and not on each individual voter's personal and nuanced adherence. The parties are wrongly assumed to be polar opposites on the political spectrum by most US citizens, but they're not.
That holodomor example isn’t a good one. That article is up for, and mostly pertains to, the debate surrounding whether or not it was technically a genocide.
It finds that "Getting a public Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20 percent." That could mean judges are citing cases with wikipedia entries rather than similar cases without and their judicial behaviour remains the same.