Wikipedia Influences Judicial Behavior维基百科影响司法

Mixed appraisals of one of the Inter-net’s major resources， Wikipedia， are reflected in the slightly dystopian article “List of Wikipedia Scandals.” Yet billions of users routinely flock to the online， anonymously editable， encyclo-pedic knowledge bank for just about everything. How this unauthoritative source influences our discourse and decisions is hard to trace. But a new study attempts to measure how knowledge gleaned1 from Wikipedia may play out in one specific realm： the courts.

维基百科是互联网一大信息来源，人们对其褒贬不一，从稍带反乌托邦色彩的文章《维基百科丑闻一览》中即可见一斑。然而，维基百科这个允许用户匿名编辑的在线知识库无所不包，所以数十亿用户依旧蜂拥而至，无所不问。尽管很难确定这个非权威的信息来源会如何影响人们的话语和决策，但一项新研究试图考察获取自维基百科的知识如何对司法这一特定领域产生影响。

A team of researchers led by Neil Thompson， a research scientist2 at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory （CSAIL）， came up with a friendly experiment： creating new legal Wikipedia articles to examine how they affect the legal decisions of judges. They set off by developing over 150 new Wikipedia articles on Irish Supreme Court decisions， written by law students. Half of these were randomly chosen to be uploaded online， where they could be used by judges， clerks， lawyers， and so on—the “treatment” group. The other half were kept offline， and this second group of cases provided the counterfactual basis of what would happen to a case absent a Wikipedia article about it （the “control”）. They then looked at two measures： whether the cases were more likely to be cited as precedents3 by subsequent judicial decisions， and whether the argumentation in court judgments echoed the linguistic content of the new Wikipedia pages.

尼尔·汤普森是麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室的研究科学家，由他领衔的研究团队设计了一个切实可行的实验：在维基百科上发表新的法律文章，观察这些文章会如何影响法官的司法决策。该团队首先备好150多篇由法学生撰写的维基百科文章，内容有关爱尔兰最高法院的判决。之后从中随机选取一半作为“实验组”，上传到维基百科，可供法官、书记员、律师等相关从业人员查阅参考。另一半则作为“对照组”不予上传，与实验组形成对照，考察如果没有相关的维基百科文章，案件会如何判决。接下来，研究人员关注两方面：实验组文章中的案例是否更有可能被之后的司法判决引用作判例；法院裁决论证部分的遣词造句是否与上传到维基百科的新文章有雷同之处。

It turned out the published articles tipped the scales4： Getting a public Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20 percent. The increase was statistically significant， and the effect was particularly strong for cases that supported the argument the citing judge was making in their decision. Unsurprisingly， the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts and mostly absent for citations by appellate courts. The researchers suspect this is showing that Wikipedia is used more by judges or clerks who have a heavier workload， for whom the convenience of Wikipedia offers a greater attraction.

结果表明，上传的文章被引用得更多：将案例写成公开的维基百科文章，其引用量增加了20%以上。这一增量具有统计学显著性，而且如果法官引用的案例支持其判决主张，则增效尤为显著。不出所料，下级法院的引用量增幅较大，而上诉法院的则几乎不变。研究人员猜测，这表明工作量较大的法官或书记员使用维基百科的频率更高，对他们来说，维基百科的便利性更具吸引力。

“To our knowledge， this is the first randomized field experiment5 that investigates the influence of legal sources on judicial behavior. And because randomized experiments are the gold stand-ard for this type of research， we know the effect we are seeing is causation， not just correlation，” says Thompson， the lead author of the study. “The fact that we wrote up all these cases， but the only ones that ended up on Wikipedia were those that won the proverbial ‘coin flip，’ allows us to show that Wikipedia is influencing both what judges cite and how they write up their decisions.”

“据我们所知，这是首个通过随机现场实验，研究法律渊源对司法行为影响的实验。因为随机实验是这类研究的黄金准则，所以我们确定实验结果不仅体现出相关性，还存在因果关系。”该研究论文的主要作者汤普森说，“我们把所有案例撰写成文，但最终上传到维基百科的只是众所周知的“抛硬币”般随机选出的一半，这让我们得以看到维基百科既会影响法官引用的案例，也会影响他们撰写判决的方式。”

“Our results also highlight an important public policy issue，” Thompson adds. “With a source that is as widely used as Wikipedia， we want to make sure we are building institutions to ensure that the information is of the highest quality. The finding that judges or their staffs are using Wikipedia is a much bigger worry if the information they find there isn’t reliable.”

汤普森补充道：“实验结果还突显了一个重要的公共政策问题。对于像维基百科这样应用广泛的信息来源，我们一定要建立制度规范，以确保其提供的信息是最优质的。我们在实验中发现，法官或法院工作人员确实在使用维基百科，如果他们搜到的信息不可靠，那么情况就更令人担忧了。”

In 2018， Thompson first visited the idea of proving the causal role that Wikipedia plays in shaping knowledge and behavior by looking at how it shapes academic science6. It turns out that adding scientific articles， in this case about chemistry， changed how the topic was discussed in scientific literature， and science articles added as references to Wikipedia received more academic citations as well.

2018年，汤普森首次提出，可以通过探究维基百科对学院科学的影响，来证明维基百科在塑造知识和行为的过程中发挥了因果作用。结果表明，将科学论文添加至维基百科（当年上传的是化学论文），会改变科学文献对于相关课题的讨论。被维基百科引用作参考文献的科学论文，在学术界的引用量也会更高。

That led Brian McKenzie， an associate professor at Maynooth University， to make a call. “I was working with students to add articles to Wikipedia at the time I read Neil’s research on the influence of Wikipedia on scientific research，” explains McKenzie. “There were only a handful of Irish Supreme Court cases on Wikipedia so I reached out to Neil to ask if he wanted to design another iteration of his experiment using court cases.”

得知这一结果，梅努斯大学副教授布赖恩·麦肯齐通过电话联系到汤普森团队。“读到尼尔研究维基百科影响科研的论文时，我正和学生往维基百科里添加文章。”麦肯齐解释道，“维基百科上的爱尔兰最高法院判例不多，所以我主动找到尼尔，问他想不想用法院判例作实验材料，再设计一个同款实验。”