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UK Police Told To Use Wikipedia When Preparing For Court

Posted by Soulskill on from the citation-needed dept.

Half-pint HAL tips news of UK prosecution lawyers who are instructing police to study information on Wikipedia when preparing to give expert testimony in court. "Mike Finn, a weaponry specialist and expert witness in more than 100 cases, told industry magazine Police Review: 'There was one case in a Midlands force where police officers asked me to write a report about a martial art weapon. The material they gave me had been printed out from Wikipedia. The officer in charge told me he was advised by the CPS to use the website to find out about the weapon and he was about to present it in court. I looked at the information and some of it had substance and some of it was completely made up.' Mr. Finn, a former Metropolitan Police and City of London officer and Home Office adviser, added that he has heard of at least three other cases where officers from around the country have been advised by the CPS to look up evidence on Wikipedia."

1 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. It must be true, because someone on /. said so! by mdwh2 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Put up or shut up: show me the evidence that shows that Wikipedia is no more accurate than random data. Indeed, even show me the evidence that it is significantly unreliable compared with sources that people regularly accept without question (other encyclopedias, the media, people like you posting on Slashdot).

    Otherwise I'll just point out that even a broken clock posting on Slashdot might have a point some of the time. The irony is that whilst dismissing and ridiculing material on Wikipedia out of hand, even when it's referenced, people happily swallow up unreferenced unsupported statements from an anonymous poster on an online forum (which, incidentally, Wikipedia does not accept as a reliable source), simply because it fits with their pre-existing prejudice against the site.

    Last time I looked, broken clocks didn't give a reference to a working clock. So for any article that is referenced (which these days on Wikipedia, is just about any article on mainstream or non-trivial topics), your analogy is not relevant.