November 13th, 2008
No judicial notice for Wikipedia
It seems that courts will not take judicial notice of Wikipedia entries. A Texas appellate court declined a defendant’s request that the court take notice of Wiki’s page on the Reid technique of interviewing and interrogation, the Internet Cases blog notes.
Fed. R. Evid. 201 provides that a court may take judicial notice of a fact not in the record where it is “either (1) generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the trial court or (2) capable of accurate and ready determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned.”
The court found that Wikipedia was not a reliable website because anyone can edit its pages.
In another case, a federal court declined to take judicial notice of an entry on Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. So the point seems fairly well settled: a site that anyone can edit can “reasonably be questioned.”
In the Texas case, I’m not sure why the defendant needed notice of the Wikipedia page, since the Reid technique is a trademark of the Reid firm and definitive information could be gleaned from the Reid site.
