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Prosecutor Loses Case For Citing Wikipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports on a recent case where the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) lost an appeal after seeking to impeach the testimony of a defendant's expert witness by citing an article from Wikipedia. In her brief, the defendant said 'the authority, alluded to by oppositor-appellant, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders DSM-IV-TR," was taken from an Internet website commonly known as Wikipedia,' and argued that Wikipedia itself contains a disclaimer saying it 'makes no guarantee of validity.' The court in finding for the defendant said in its decision that it found 'incredible ... if not a haphazard attempt, on the part of the (OSG) to impeach an expert witness, with, as pointed out by (the defendant) unreliable information. This is certainly unacceptable evidence, nothing short of a mere allegation totally unsupported by authority.'"
Try to find the story on wikipedia?
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
The whole idea smacks of academic elitism. I edit Wikipedia articles on a few different subjects and I can say without equivocation that my knowledge of those subjects is second to none. Granted, none of them is going to change the world but they are topics of interest to me and I have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of them.
It's no different than "Oh. HE says that. Well you know how unreliable he is.", without any proof of the incorrectness of the statement, it gets completely disregarded.
I think it's a bad idea to quote JUST wikipedia in a court case, but come on... To dismiss information out of hand just because it came from the internet is just as ridiculous as accepting the testimony of any expert at face value.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Heh, actually I'm not even American. I was just making an observation. Seems like I hit a nerve... the same is possibly true for the masses of the opposition. Fortunately you just helped me make my real point.
This seems to me to be a bit overstretching the "truth" about Wikipedia and smacks of a little trollness aimed at it. I don't advocate citing it in cases of real-world serious business such as law or education, but for every day research about general knowledge it's relatively "truthful" enough to be of good use. You're basically claiming that because it's "crowdsourced" it must be useless rubbish. Certainly there is plenty of mass stupidity out there trying to pose as truth, but an informed researcher will be able to sniff out the garbage in the information they are looking for and a really smart researcher will use more than one source to try to confirm and cross-reference each one to get a consensus of "truth" from multiple sources. I like Wikipedia for general non-life or death use.
You can watch Beck on the TV, if you try to take your Rascal down to the Lincoln Memorial you're just going to get lost. And just for the record, you aren't married to Sarah Palin, okay? Sheesh. You'd think those nurses could figure out how to get a cranky old white guy to take his meds.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I hear you rape goats.
You can't rape the willing.
Well, when you're ill you see a doctor rather than a car mechanic. You might still investigate what the doctor tells you but can you understand why you choose the doctor?
Might? Without question I will investigate the advice that the doctor gives me, s/he'll most likely be right but I will still check.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano