Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases

Ballin

Could someone please review Wikipedia:Article Incubator/United States v. Ballin? — [[::User:RHaworth|RHaworth]] (talk · contribs) 03:15, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Use of Justia.com

I appreciate everyone who is trying to fill the fix the flood of redlinks in all of the List of Supreme Court cases, volume X articles. I've noticed, however, that a number of them are directly copied and pasted from Justia.com. Is this okay to do? Verkhovensky (talk) 06:15, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Could you provide some diffs so we can see exactly what you're talking about? postdlf (talk) 13:50, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Not totally sure if this is what Verkhovensky was referring to, but I've seen a couple of instances recently where someone had added Justia.com links in place of valid wikilinks to existing pages. (See, e.g., this edit, which includes some changes of this sort.) This seems completely inappropriate (and I reverted the edit which I just gave as an example). Richwales (talk) 17:10, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

What I was referring to were the articles about the cases in List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 113. Many of the case articles are copied and pasted from the Justia.com case summaries. A few examples are:

• Pullman Palace Car Co. v. Speck
• Findlay v. McAllister
• Central Railroad & Banking Co. of Ga. v. Pettus
• Northern Liberty Market Co. v. Kelly
• Tucker v. Masser
• Anderson County Comm'rs v. Beal
• Avegno v. Schmidt

These are just a few of the more egregious examples, but almost every single article in the volume in cribbed directly from Justia.com. Verkhovensky (talk) 18:03, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Just looking at the first few, the text seems just to be taken from portions of the Court's original opinion. Which is an issue of poor article writing, but nothing more. Those that have no content beyond opinion text could justifiably be speedy deleted. And if you can identify any that have original content taken from Justia (not just copies of the public domain SCOTUS opinions), however, those would likely be copyvios.

Also, there's no reason to favor Justia as a source of Court opinions over other websites. We have a template for giving multiple sources at Template:caselaw source, so any instance in which you find only Justia as a link should be replaced with that template and sources from Findlaw, enfacto, etc. (see it in use at Texas v. Johnson, for example). postdlf (talk) 02:32, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I think Postdlf makes excellent points. I agree that a lot of the text is cribbed from the court opinions themselves, but it appears to me (and I could be mistaken) that a lot of the text is also taken from the Justia.com summary of the case, and not the actual text of the opinion. Verkhovensky (talk) 02:38, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Is it justia's summary, or is it the Court's official summary (called a "syllabus" and written by the Clerk's Office)? The articles that I've written have certainly leaned heavily on the syllabi, particularly for their summaries of the case history and factual record. 121a0012 (talk) 04:40, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I suppose it's possible that the summaries are actually the syllabi, though a lot of them seem a bit too long for that. But then again that could just mean that Justia summaries are actually combinations of the written opinions and syllabi. I suppose this might require some more thorough investigation. Verkhovensky (talk) 04:58, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Following up on 121a0012's sage suggestion I looked at the syllabi of the cases in question. It does indeed appear that Justia uses a combination of the syllabi and excerpts from the written opinions for their summaries. It looks like the mystery has been solved. Thanks to all for your help! Verkhovensky (talk) 05:17, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Supreme Court web site change

Given the announcement that the Supreme Court is changing it web site, I recently began mass-editing URLs from supremecourtus.gov to supremecourt.gov. Well, it sounds like the change might be more complicated than I originally thought. postdlf found some links that have been moved, but it sounds like that might have happened before the new web site went online. But as the result of changing the URLs, some links that redirected to the new web site ended up getting a 404. postdlf is working on dealing with those issues in the "lists by term and justice", but there are many pages that does not cover.

Based on the press release, it sounds like the supremecourtus.gov domain will be removed as of July 1, 2010, which sounds strange to me, since I would expect that they would simply point it to the new servers. But nonetheless, there are still a large number of references to supremecourtus.gov on Wikipedia, which may break on July 1. Converting to the new domain name seems to make sense, but I want to make sure that we have the least amount of disruption. So my question is, what is the appropriate action to take from here?

-- JPMcGrath (talk) 22:40, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

No comments? Does anyone see any reason not to resume changing supremecourtus.gov to supremecourt.gov? -- JPMcGrath (talk) 08:09, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, err, don't change links if the old ones work and the new ones break. It sounds like one of those "we'll burn that bridge when we get there" situations. I can't imagine that the U.S. Supreme Court would intentionally break all old links, but if they do at some point in the future, the links can be adjusted once they're actually broken. Preemptive URL guessing seems like a bad idea that's prone to breaking more than it fixes. --MZMcBride (talk) 12:23, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

There is nothing really preemptive about it - the new web site is up and the old one is going away. I have been checking, and I have not found any that are broken at supremecourt.gov that were not already broken. Many of them are broken, in that they now redirect to http://www.supremecourt.gov/ rather than retrieve the intended file. I am looking into whether I can write some scripts to check them all. If I can do that, I can mark the dead ones with and fix the ones that still work at the new domain -- JPMcGrath (talk) 14:07, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Outside of the contents of Category:Lists of United States Supreme Court opinions by term and Category:Lists of United States Supreme Court opinions by justice, all of which I have already taken care of, what articles have SCOTUS links? Are these just links to the pdfs of slip opinions in scattered individual case articles? postdlf (talk) 15:27, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Special:LinkSearch/supremecourt.gov. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:32, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

It shouldn't be too hard to write a script that checks if the link is a 404. I looked at Special:LinkSearch a bit and it seems that neither supremecourt.gov or supremecourtus.gov are used very much. Both had less than 500 links, from what I saw. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:33, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Every day, I learn how to do something new on here... There are 939 uses of www.supremecourtus.gov on Wikipedia. There are 236 uses of supremecourtus.gov. So that's quite a lot of links to fix.

Just http://supremecourt.gov does not work, so any change will have to use the form http://www.supremecourt.gov. I've also discovered that some categories of pages have not otherwise kept the same URL with the domain name change: all of the opinion lists by term, such as slip opinions, in-chambers, opinions related to orders. So the content originally at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08slipopinion.html, for example, is now at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx?Term=08. By contrast, the URLs for pdfs of opinions, such as http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-1216.pdf, seem to be the same at the new domain name.

So I think the next step should be to review the link results above, and test for each category of links (bound volume lists, dockets, oral argument transcripts, etc.) to see which ones can be fixed with just a domain name change and which ones need to be completely changed. postdlf (talk) 15:58, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

I wrote a template that automatically included the relevant case links based on the volume it was being used on: {{SCOTUSLinks}}. It'd probably be a lot smarter to replace the current "External links" sections with the template. It looks like quite a few pages are already using the template. If someone has AWB and some extra time, standardization would be nice. It would mean being able to make one edit to a template rather than 545+ edits every time a link changes.... --MZMcBride (talk) 16:24, 24 March 2010 (UTC)