Saturday, February 21, 2009
Proposed enhancements to Wikipedia might convince more courts of its reliability
I can't give you a link to this one because the story comes from a subscription only service, the February 4th edition of BNA's Electronic Commerce & Law Report (although you can find another news report here). But if there was a link, it would tell you that Wikipedia's founder recently urged the "Wikimedia Foundation" to a adopt a "flagged revision" system that would require all entries posted by anonymous contributors to receive approval from so-called "reliable" users or special Wikipedia "administrators."
BNA goes on to point out that although 100's of courts have cited to Wikipedia, there are still several that refuse to do so because of the anonymous nature of the entries and resulting lack of verification as to their accuracy. We reported on one of those decisions here where a Texas appellate court refused to take judicial notice of a Wikipedia entry for just those reasons. Wikipedia hopes that by implementing this new verification system, the majority of courts will eventually embrace Wikipedia as they do with more traditional secondary sources.
I am the scholarship dude.
(jbl)
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwriting/2009/02/proposed-enhanc.html