User:AHeneen/sandbox/Wikipedia cited in case law

Wikipedia has been cited in numerous legal opinions.

United States federal courts
United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit "Press reports after the State Department country report in 2004 state that a military coup occurred August 3, 2005. See Wikipedia, Mauritania, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritania (last visited Jan. 17, 2006); U.S. Dep't of State, Background Note: Mauritania, at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/ 5467.htm# govtnote (last visited Jan. 17, 2006)."

- Judge Merritt

United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit "Value-added taxes, which are common in the rest of the world, operate in much the same way. They are designed to tax consumption, and so their incidence falls on the consumer even though they are collected by a retailer. For a general description of their operation, see, e.g., Frequently Asked Questions, EURO VAT REFUND, http://www.eurovat.com/faq.htm; Value-added tax, WIKIPEDIA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax (both last visited July 30, 2015, as were all websites cited in this opinion)."

- Chief Judge Wood

United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit "According to a popular encyclopedic website, in the eight years preceding the incident underlying the instant appeal, there had been 10 well-known, student-perpetrated shootings in schools, not including college campuses, located within the United States. Wikipedia, School Shooting, http://www.wikipedia.org (on the main page search term "school shooting") (last visited July 11, 2007); see also..."

- Judge Dubina

United States state courts
Tennessee Court of Appeals, Eastern Section
 * In a case challenging whether a producer of bottled spring water needed to pay a bottler's privilege tax that applied to any non-alcoholic beverage, the Tennessee Department of Revenue compiled several definitions of "beverage":

"Group A...

A drink specifically prepared for human consumption. Almost always it largely consists of water. These include water, from the tap or from a bottle. 10) Wikipedia

...

The sources that offer the strongest support for the Department's argument that the term "beverage" includes water are those set forth in Group A, as these definitions are quite broad and generally define "beverage" as a drinkable liquid of any type. However, in our view some of the sources listed in Group A are of questionable authority.

In this regard, we note the source designated Wikipedia which specifically defines bottled water as a beverage. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), is a computer internet site describing itself as follows:


 * Wikipedia ... is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia. It is written collaboratively by volunteers with wiki software, meaning articles can be added or changed by nearly anyone.

It appears that the only case in the United States that has ever referenced Wikipedia is a nonpublished/nonciteable California case. See Patel v. Shah, No. G033741, 2004 WL 2930914, (Calif. App. 4 Dist. Dec. 17, 2004). Given the fact that this source is open to virtually anonymous editing by the general public, the expertise of its editors is always in question, and its reliability is indeterminable. Accordingly, we do not find that it constitutes persuasive authority."

- Judge Lee

Critical commentary on use of Wikipedia as a citation

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