[photochemsyn]

This study should have been controlled by asking whether courts had access to the curated legal databases (primarily LexisNexis, I imagine):

> "...the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts — the High Court — and mostly absent for citations by appellate courts — the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal."

Secondly, is it possible that the study designers themselves used LexisNexis to research their Wikipedia articles? The study design was based on:

> "...creating new legal Wikipedia articles to examine how they affect the legal decisions of judges. They set off by developing over 150 new Wikipedia articles on Irish Supreme Court decisions, written by law students. Half of these were randomly chosen to be uploaded online, where they could be used by judges, clerks, lawyers, and so on — the “treatment” group."

If these Wikipedia articles were based on LexisNexis research, and that same LexisNexis database was being used by judges and clerks, this would seem to introduce some major biases (making the study rather worthless in terms of measuring Wikipedia influence).

[pushedx]

The 77 cases that were given a Wikipedia article saw a 17% increase in citations after publication.

One significant outcome of giving a case a Wikipedia article described in the paper but not in the article is that the case receives an infobox visible at the top of search results for most search engines.

[whatshisface]

Maybe there's a rising tide of interest in certain cases that lifts both Wikipedians and jurists.

[CrazyStat]

Cases were randomly selected to have Wikipedia write-ups posted about them or not.

This is all in the article.