Idiot-savant Eugene Volokh is two-faced about blogs v. Wikipedia

I call Prof. Volokh -- a blogger on the very popular law blog Volokh Conspiracy -- an idiot-savant because he was a prodigy in math and computer science, getting a BS degree in these fields from UCLA at the incredibly young age of 15 (UCLA must have waived some general-ed requirements), but in his chosen field, the law, he is too stupid to even just recognize his own blatant contradictions. A previous post on this blog shows that he is in favor of arbitrary censorship of blog visitors' comments, and he is completely unconcerned about how this censorship can adversely affect the reliability and fairness of authoritative citations of blogs by court opinions, scholarly journal articles, and other authorities. However, his views on citation of Wikipedia are a completely different story. In a post on his blog, he said,
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. . . .I much admire the Wikipedia project, and my hat would be off to Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, its cofounders, if I wore a hat. The concept of an encyclopedia that is cowritten by lots of people, each of whom has the power to edit any of its pages — with the main screening mechanism being the possibility of correction by others — sounds odd. But it seems to work pretty well; and of course the real question isn't whether the work is perfectly reliable, but (1) how reliable it is compared to the alternatives, (2) whether that's good enough for the particular use you're making of it (e.g., casual attempts to satisfy curiosity rather than decisions where someone's life or even a lot of money is on the line), and (3) whether the work's advantages in thoroughness, currency, convenience, and low cost exceed the possible reliability disadvantages. (Here, by the way, is the Wikipedia response to the arguments that free editing may make the encyclopedia too unreliable.)

Still, I wonder whether it's good for court opinions, which not only resolve disputes between parties but also effectively create law that governs future disputes, to rely on something that at least has the potential to be so easily compromised, whether as part of a deliberate strategy or not . . . .And I suspect the main source of error in court opinions isn't relying on simply mistaken information but rather relying on one source that says one thing when a dozen other more reliable sources that the court hasn't found say the opposite, and more persuasively. Maybe on balance Wikipedia is good enough, especially when the information that the court is drawing from it is likely to be pretty uncontroversial. Nonetheless, it strikes me as something that judges and law clerks should be cautious about using.

And I suppose that blogs that arbitrarily censor visitors' comments do not have the "potential" to be "easily compromised" as "part of a deliberate strategy"? And Volokh does not even mention one of the main sources of unreliability and unfairness in Wickedpedia articles: Wickedpedia admininstrators' censorship of disputed ideas and factual information. Many of the Wickedpedia administrators are cranks themselves.

For a list of this blog's posts about Wikipedia, just click on the "Wikipedia" label below. The posts in the list will be shown the way that they appear in the home and archive pages.
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