Assessing Web 2.0 information - part 1
Monday, August 31st, 2009 by Linda Moore54% of legal professionals in the Asia Pacific region use Web 2.0 for professional research, according to research CCH conducted last year.
You won’t find that particular figure in our original whitepaper results. It’s part of some further analysis I did on the results for my presentation at the upcoming Australian Law Librarians Association conference. I’ll put up a copy of the presentation and paper after the conference is finished but I thought I would give you a taste by posting some of the material I wrote that wound up on the cutting room floor. Here goes!
54% of legal professionals in the Asia Pacific region use Web 2.0 for professional research, according to research CCH conducted last year.
What does this growing trend of legal professionals using Web 2.0 for research mean for law librarians? There have been many papers and debates of late on the decline of legal research skills (check out these ones from the ALLA conference last year). Is the growing reliance on Web 2.0 a symptom of the “Google researcher” problem, or is there genuine value to be drawn from this alternative source of information?
A New Jersey court of appeal case recently gained the attention of the online legal community when it reversed a judge’s decision on the basis that it relied on evidence drawn from Wikipedia. The appeal court ruled:
“it is entirely possible for a party in litigation to alter a Wikipedia article, print the article and thereafter offer it in support of any given position. Such a malleable source of information is inherently unreliable and clearly not one ‘whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned,’” such as would support judicial notice under New Jersey Evidence Rule 201(b)(3).”
Source: Wikipedia.org:Researching with Wikipedia
This is certainly not the only time Wikipedia has been used as a source of reference or evidence in a US or indeed in an Australian court (eg [2008] 78 IPR 41 or [2006] FMCAfam 238). A sign of poor research skills? Not necessarily. A wise lawyer or judge who cites Wikipedia would only use it for general reference and definitions and/or in conjunction with supporting evidence or sources. This is in fact what Wikipedia itself recommends . A review of the examples cited will support this trend, whereas the New Jersey case had no other supporting source for the issue at hand. Lawyers are aware of the dangers of citing Wikipedia: only 20% of respondents felt Wikipedia had more than moderate professional value compared to 38% of respondents overall. So if Wikipedia is definitely not a quality Web 2.0 source, what is?
Slaw.ca is a blog that reports and analyses new developments in Canadian law and law in general. It is a co-operative blog written by law professors, legal associates, the director of a law society, law librarians and law students. In other words, people well qualified to provide quality professional commentary on legal developments. In fact, Slaw is deemed to be of such high quality that the Canadian Association of Law Librarians awarded it the 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.
Wikipedia and Slaw represent two extremes of the spectrum of information available from Web 2.0 sources. In between lies an enormous variety of blogs, wikis, tweet streams and other sources of varying quality and currency. Enter the librarian. This is an opportunity for us to do what we have always done: sift through the mass of materials available and identify those that are most relevant to our clients. More importantly, we need to educate our users on sourcing and assessing these materials for themselves.
Tomorrow I will look at Maureen Henniger’s evaluation criteria for an information source and how the transparency of Web 2.0 culture actually makes it relatively easy to assess the validity and accuracy of a source.
