Nevada Appellate Lawyer & Attorney : Tami D. Cowden : Nevada Supreme Court, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

• Send To A Friend
• Print This Article
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

Texas Appellate Law Blog recently questioned whether the 5^th Circuit should have cited to Wikipedia for the definition of the word “accrue” (although the term defined in the wiki is actually “accrual”). With Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Commissioner, the 5^th Circuit joins a number of other federal circuits who have similarly cited to the collaborative encyclopedia as an authority.

The Volokh Conspiracy first reported a federal court citation to Wikipedia way back in 2004, noting the potential risk to citing to an authority that is “so easily compromised.” Fast forward a few years, and in January 2007, the New York Times reported that more than one hundred judicial opinions, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, contained references to the wiki resource. The Times article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of such usage, with the various legal authorities cited therein generally coming down in favor of citation if limited to tangential, background matters.

I began writing this post with the idea that protests against citing wikis were but another example of Luddite-like obstinacy against progress. Why shouldn’t collective intelligence be considered reliable, especially when used for matters such as popular definitions? As James Surowiecki told us in The Wisdom of Crowds,  “Ask the Audience” was the most reliable lifeline in Who Wants to be A Millionaire?

But then I stumbled upon Wikipedia’s own article on the topic, Wikipedia as a court source. In contrast to the New York Time’s count of more than one hundred references (confirmed by a quick review of the results of a Westlaw search), Wikipedia reports itself appearing in fewer than forty citations – and more than a few of those were not even court opinions, but instead, references in briefs and foreign legal documents.   The most recent example, Exxon Mobil Corp. does not appear. 

Therein lies a substantial risk of citing collaborative resources.  None of the collectively intelligent have yet taken sufficient interest in this topic to insure the litany is complete.