Admissibility of using information from the online encyclopaedia wikipedia in the decision and legal justification of the judgment of an administrative court. a comment approving the judgment of the Provincial administrative Court in Gliwice of December 14, 2022, ii sa/Gl 1201/22, leX no. 3454101

In the judgment of December 14, 2022, II SA/Gl 1201/22, the Provincial Adminis-trative Court in Gliwice stated, that the general principles of legal interpretation, in the absence of a legal definition, require reaching to the linguistic meaning of a specific notion, including the definition contained in Wikipedia. However, when appreciating the importance of technology, one should be aware that Wikipedia is not a dictionary or encyclopaedia created by specialists according to specific rules; may therefore contain inaccuracies or distortions. The central legal problem of the commented judgment is the scope of using Wikipedia in the operational interpretation of law. The jurisprudential thesis concerns interesting issue of the general usefulness of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge, primarily the assessment of the admissibility of its use in constructing evaluative and argumentative state-ments. According to the glossator, the presented view expressed in the judgment of the Provincial Administrative Court in Gliwice deserves full approval, because recognizing the undoubted advantages of Wikipedia, the judges call for a cautious approach to the information contained therein. This study attempts to strengthen this position by arguing, that using an online encyclopaedia carries a potentially high risk and therefore referring to it in a court decision always requires additional consideration and cannot be done thoughtlessly.