US Judges Use Wikipedia As a Courtroom Source

It is an encyclopedia written by nobody but Wikipedia is rapidly becoming prime source material for American judges.

A search of court decisions by the New York Times turned up more than 100 rulings that have cited the online encyclopedia since 2004, including 13 from the circuit court of appeals, one rung beneath the supreme court; America's highest court has yet to succumb to the site's call.

Despite its status among the 20 most popular sites on the internet, its reputation suffered when several cases emerged of entries being tampered with by pranksters or containing errors. In 2005, a writer was falsely accused of being linked to the assassinations of John F Kennedy and his brother, Robert, by a Nashville delivery driver playing a joke on a co-worker. The writer, John Seigenthaler, who had served as an administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy and was one of the pall bearers at his funeral, was not amused.

This month, the history department at Middlebury College, a small private institution, voted to ban students from citing the website in academic work. Professors at other colleges forbid students from using Wikipedia as their central source.

But it has established a berth in the courtroom, despite concerns among some legal scholars about the dangers of relying on unreliable sources. In a 2005 case before the Tennessee court of appeals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the site was used to help define the meaning of the word "beverage". It was also cited this week in a federal district court in Florida to offer background on the term "booty music", the New York Times said.

In one instance cited by the newspaper, a decision from a Chicago appeals court cited Wikipedia in a drugs case - even though the judge, Richard Posner, had first-hand experience of its unreliability. One entry had said the conservative commentator Ann Coulter had been his law clerk. Mr Posner has never met her.