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ARTICLE · 24 JANUARY 2017

Pitfalls Of Judges, Lawyers, And Experts Citing Wikipedia

Reed Smith
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Our weekly search for new drug/medical device cases for 1/13/17 turned up something unusual – not of particular substantive significance, but unusual. Two of the opinions included citations to Wikipedia.

United StatesLitigation, Mediation & Arbitration
James Beck
James Beck
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Our weekly search for new drug/medical device cases for 1/13/17 turned up something unusual – not of particular substantive significance, but unusual. Two of the opinions included citations to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia? You mean the comprehensive online encyclopedia that is crowd-sourced, so that anybody – even us – can edit/alter the information contained on the entries (at least, most of them)? That's it. Since the provenance of the information on Wikipedia is unknown, as lawyers we've been taught never, ever to cite to it as authoritative in filed papers (we often cite to it on the blog). After all, given the high stakes of most of our litigation, an attorney citing to Wikipedia could have just added the information to which s/he is citing.

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