[roenxi]

It isn't that obvious that this is alarming. What are we alarmed about?

The point of judges is that they make judgements. The citing of other law is just to try and keep some consistency between the judgements to make them predictable. In theory they could even give out inconsistent judgements and that would also be workable, it just happens that it usually means something bad is happening because judges aren't naturally more pleasant people than the horrible Mass of Humans that causes so much grief. So we want judges to put in an effort at consistency and if they are consistently using Wikipedia as a reference then it is easier for the rest of us to guess what the system is about to do.

It is easy to influence judicial opinion on a case. There are even professionals hired to do it as a full time job! We call them lawyers.

[MichaelCollins]

The part that concerns ('alarm' implies surprise) me is the confirmation that activist wikipedians have levers and knobs to play with that impact court decisions.

And if Wikipedia does, you can bet Google does too.

[merely-unlikely]

Seems to me that any concern here is more around case discovery. Whether judges learn about cases from Wikipedia, Lexis Nexus, university publications, etc there is always a bias in which cases get surfaced. Wikipedia being more open than most other venues can be good (more contributors/diversity of viewpoints, easier to critique) or bad (more potentially unsophisticated/ignorant contributions). I tend to bias toward more open platforms given the choice.

[phpisthebest]

>>What are we alarmed about?

While I think the study has some major deficiencies addressed in other comments, if it was true, the alarm for me would be that Wikipedia has clearly become politically partisan in many area's and topics, including some that would intersect the law

Wikipedia is hardly a "neutral" site of just facts

[haswell]

Do those have topics have anything to do with the class of Wikipedia article mentioned in the study?

I’m not saying there isn’t bias, but the existence of bias in certain controversial subjects isn’t necessarily evidence that articles about cases are subject to the same kinds of issues. I’m not saying they’re immune either, but it’s not clear that the two are related.