BC Law IPTF Blog

Techdirt: Should Judges Cite Wikipedia?

In fact, the article notes that one case was later overturned when a higher court had problems with the lower court’s use of Wikipedia — though, ironically, to make their point, they too cited Wikipedia (though, they focused on the site’s disclaimers, which are just as editable as any other page so present the same problem the lower court supposedly had in citing them). It appears that most judges that cite Wikipedia do so on mostly unimportant matters, to fill in details or explanations on issues that are not central to the decision-making.

This issue could be helped by using the Harvard suggestion for citing Wikipedia. The Harvard citation format requires one to cite to the time in the article’s history that you are citing. By clicking on the history tab at the top of an article, one may then navigate to the actual text that the clerk has cited. (Also, maybe it shouldn’t be that “judges” are citing Wikipedia, as much as their law clerks are.)

The deeper issue is that encylopedic knowledge is harder to find and less trustworthy than it used to be–back when we had no other “better” option. Other than Wikipedia, my best bets are Encarta or Britannica (both of which charge for usage) or the Columbia Encyclopedia. But none are as exhaustive as Wikipedia.

But for non-essential uses, clerks merely need a source to cite for sub-common knowledge, i.e., knowledge that not everyone knows, but everyone could know if they did a Google search.

People’s knowledge bases are no longer limited to what they have on the tips of their tongues or at the fore of their brains, but common knowledge might also include information one can find from a few minutes selecting links from a Google search result.

So this semester I’m working at the BC Legal Assistance Bureau. The file management system here is very basic: a shared server, via Samba (luckily, so my Mac can connect), and a client documents folder, with sub-folders organized by client name.

This seems to work. But a standardized file-naming convention could help. For example, I was looking for introductory letters for my clients–y’know, “Hi, my name’s Paul, and I’m the student attorney transfered to your case.” I’d go into a random client’s case folder and see files like “Letter.doc” or “Letter July 2.doc” or “Welcome.doc”–you get the picture. It’s hard to find the proper document.

I wish things were easier to find. I have a crappy file-naming convention, but it works well enough for me:

[Client last name].[Client first initial].[File description].[mmddyy].doc.

Smith.J.welcomeLetter.011907.doc

So the first two parts defeat a bit of the purpose of the folders. You’re in the “Smith, John” folder, so putting “Smith.J” is redundant. But if you were to e-mail it to someone, they’d know where to put it.

The description is fairly fluid, which is bad, but as long as you put good faith in trying to communicate to the next user the contents, then it’s OK. Better yet if you can standardize it, so that you can sort alphabetically and the most recent letter (by month in our American convention) would be first. (So, actually, the better way to do it would be [yymmdd], but who am I to buck macro-social conventions?)

Whatever. I think that people should think more about how they name files because those are the primary “tags” that people use to discover or find documents. I don’t think there should be a global standard, but I think that at least people should think about how they name files just a few beats more so that it’s easier for people to find what they might need.