Apple v. Does Court Cites Wikipedia
As Denise noted, the Apple v. Does opinion cites Wikipedia extensively — eleven times, by my count. In 2003, I opined that citation to Wikipedia in the course of a legal argument was asking for trouble, since anyone — even opposing counsel — could pull the factual rug out from under one’s argument.
The California Court of Appeal, though, dodges the problems I foresaw. It cites Wikipedia almost exclusively for the definitions of internet argot and geek pop culture references:
- Firewire (Slip Op. at 3 n.3)
- Breakout Box (Id.)
- GarageBand (Slip Op. at 3 n.4)
- Breakout (Slip Op. at 6 n.5)
- Asteroids (Id.)
- Arkanoid (Id.)
- Forum Moderator (Slip Op. at 26 n.16)
- BBS (Slip Op. at 27 n.16)
- Blog (Slip Op. at 45 n.21)
- Webzine (Id.)
- Electronic Paper (Slip Op. at 46 n.22)
These articles are particularly likely to have reached an accurate and complete equilibrium, since the core Wikipedia constituency is deeply familiar with their subject matter, and that subject matter is not hotly contested. While one can imagine a flame war emerging over precisely what is or isn’t a BBS or a blog, the opinion cites Wikipedia in the same situations I do — when the reader’s general knowledge of the subject matter will assist understanding of the argument, but the underlying details aren’t dispositive of the argument’s merit.
I think it’s also worth noting that the Breakout, Asteroids, and Arkanoid articles were cited in the court’s discussion of a purportedly revealing pun — the project was called “Asteroid,” and it was a “Breakout” box. The opinion rightly notes that this correlation is illusory, since it was Arkanoid, not Asteroids, that was a clone of Breakout. It just makes me proud. California: Our Appellate Clerks Are Even Geekier Than Our Tech-Rumor Bloggers.
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Their cites are incorrect.
Each wikipedia page has a link on the left-hand bar that says, “Cite this article”. Note how the links produced when you click on this link have specific metadata (the “oldid” element) that link to the specific version of a wikipedia page. This is so that you can return to exactly what you saw at a future date. The Court does cite the date they looked at the page… however, pages can change — quite a bit — in a day. For example, the articles for “FireWire” and “Asteroids (computer game)” were modified once on 23 May 2006 and the article for “Blog” was modified six times on 23 May 2006 (see the diff of the edits that day). This means that their cites are sometimes pointing to two versions (for “FireWire” and “Asteroids (computer game)”) or seven versions (for “Blog”) of these pages in those citations respectively. Looking at the diffs among all these versions doesn’t point to any particular problems in this case. You can imagine, with subtle edit warring happening in many articles, this could have been a problem.
Comment by joe — May 27, 2006 @ 12:34 pm
Apple v. Does (O’Grady v. Superior Court) and Wikipedia…
Discussion of the court citing Wikipedia in its decision…
Trackback by Infothought — May 30, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
Hi Joe,
Did you mean, in 2003, to suggest that a really sneaky lawyer (or anybody else) could “pull the factual rug out” by editing wikipedia so it no longer included the cited text/information? I’ve seen others make this general point. Wikipedia now includes permanent links for citing to particular articles from a particular point of time; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink , and then note on the left in the “Toolbox” the link for “permanent link”. (I’m not sure if this was a feature in 2003 or not.) If the Bluebook hasn’t figured that out yet, they should.
Laura
Comment by Laura Quilter — June 8, 2006 @ 8:00 am
Laura,
That is what I meant in my 2003 post. Conspicuous permalinks to specific versions of Wikipedia articles didn’t exist then.
The Bluebook requires (and the opinion in this case includes) a specific “date accessed” in the citation, which ends up being almost the same thing as the Wikipedia permalink (as Joe Hall points out above). The Bluebook’s requirement doesn’t take into account a web page that changes multiple times per day, as some Wikipedia articles do, so citation to the permalinked entry is probably preferable.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that citation to a permalink is always desirable. When the citation is merely intended to provide background for the reader — in Bluebook terms, when the signal is “see generally” — I think citation to the Wikipedia article in the abstract rather than to any particular version might be the most helpful citation, so that the reader can catch up with the state of knowledge on the subject at the time she is reading rather than the state of knowledge on the subject at the time the writer was writing. I’m not entirely sure about this, though, and it would be a very limited set of circumstances.
Comment by Joe Gratz — June 8, 2006 @ 9:08 am