Legal Research

What is Wikipedia good for?

By Diane Murley

As a general rule, you may use encyclopedias to find authoritative sources, but you should not quote or cite an encyclopedia.

A recent case highlights the dangers of relying on Wikipedia. In Badasa v. Mukasey, an asylum case, the Department of Homeland Security supported its argument by referencing a Wikipedia article, and the Immigration Judge relied upon the article in her ruling against Badasa.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit remanded the case to the Bureau of Immigration Appeals (BIA), noting that “The BIA presumably was concerned that Wikipedia is not a sufficiently reliable source on which to rest the determination that an alien alleging a risk of future persecution is not entitled to asylum.” In reaching its decision, the Court discussed what Wikipedia says about using it for research.

The August 29 opinion is available on the Court’s website, and on Westlaw and LexisNexis.

See Wikipedia: Researching with Wikipedia, which includes the following advice:

• Always be wary of any one single source (in any medium ? web, print, television or radio), or of multiple works that derive from a single source.
• Where articles have references to external sources (whether online or not) read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says.
• In all academic institutions, Wikipedia, along with most encyclopedias, is unacceptable as a major source for a research paper. …

The sources you cite affect what readers think of your arguments. You should always cite to the most authoritative source you can find. Use Wikipedia as a starting point, if it helps, but only cite to authoritative sources.

Full post as published by Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog on September 06, 2008 (boomark / email).