Geeklawyer is a little late publicising Nick Holmes vision of a free legal web. The vision is of a wikipedia for UK law available to lawyers & punters alike. Nick takes the view that many of the bits needed exist already: lawyers statutes case law etc etc but that all that is needed is a bit of weaving together to produce the vision.
Geeklawyer shares the enthusiasm for the idea but considers that rather a lot needs to be done. Not enough statute and statutory judgements are online: OPSI publicises a lot but it is barely in the reusable form needed for this idea. For example, the tellthemwhatyouthink.org site has a vision of publicizing government consultation documents, but it has the devil of a job because the format of the html documents published make data re-use ultra hard. The government are working hard on this.
Geeklawyer says that similar problems confound legislation publication and the limited caselaw that is online, whether published by BAILII or others. Furthermore any wiki would have to permit the re-use of the data within it by the proper use of webbot-scrapeable and reusable documents.
Nick alludes to a more serious problem: contributions. Lawyers are terribly short sighted and the efforts they expend need to yield an immediate and tangible reward before they will invest hours that might otherwise be billable. Geeklawyer remains unconvinced that more than a tiny minority will do so, which in turn leads to issues of momentum and traction. If there is little content then there will be few users and few contributors which becomes a downward spiral.
UK law wikis have not had much success so far. IPKat’s Room 6 IP Law Wiki proposal is nowhere — it doesn’t even have a webpage yet, the Patent Quality Index is blank. The Mental Health Wiki looks active but only has the original author as contributor, ditto Crime Wiki: no other lawyers. Only the UK Patents Wiki looks healthy. This is, in part, the classic problem of social networks. A bazillion of these fail for every Twitter or Facebook.
If Geeklawyer sounds sceptical it’s because he is but not because he don’t support the vision. It could work, it needs to work and it may. But it is a big job.
Thanks for the plug, Mr Geeklawyer. However, I would say that the ukpatents wiki also suffers from the lawyer free time problem. Almost all of the contributions have been from me to date. This is fine while I’m still training, but it’s doubtful whether it can last unless I start getting other enthusiastic patent types involved.
On a related point, what I would like to know is why many good lawyers devote their free (i.e. non-chargeable) time to contributing to journals and books when they don’t get any money for it, while the publishers (Sweet & Maxwell, Westlaw, Reed Elsevier et al) rake it in thanks to the contributions. How do we change this into an environment where the same good lawyers contribute to online wikis and blogs that everyone can read for free?
The main reason is I strongly suspect to do with professional reputation. A professional journal provides kudos and the right journal might provide punters, indeed I have had the benefit of that. A wiki as usually implemented would not do that.
Furthermore if I were to write a detailed opinion on, say, patent prior art would I even want want my name attached to it if some plonker could then come along add rubbish to it?
It may be that some alternative to a normal wiki would work but then you lose the good bits of standard wiki software. This has to be a solvable problem
Actually, the problem is quite easily solvable. Wikispaces allows my site to be set up so that only members of the site can make edits. Everyone can then see who did what, which should prevent others from adding anything that is not properly thought through. If I was doing it professionally, I would probably ask everyone to use their actual name and provide some sort of evidence that they are who they say they are before becoming a member. It would then be quite obvious who was providing what.
But if people are wikiing for kudos can you easily discern who wrote which bits of an article without looking at the edit history page?
I wonder if the CPD people could be convinced that lawyers should get points for contributing?
Interesting idea following on From David Pearce’s point above. If writing for a journal gets CPD hours why not for a free wiki?
It would probably get a bit unwieldy putting the contributors’ names next to their pieces, but it would always be possible to check from the history who did what. For proper recognition, I think it would be better to list the editors in one place, and keep track of which bits they are contributing to. Kind of like a real book, only it could be updated much more quickly. Certain pages can be set aside that are only editable by the organiser, and the credits page would clearly need to be one of those. It’s all possible right now, even with basic free tools like wikispaces.
It’s interesting, a similar thing is going on within academia with discussions on whether online contributions should count towards the Research Assessment Exercise.
I should imagine it would become a pool of received wisdom, with new work being put out first into journals.
I have a feeling that the existing social structures around journals have a fair amount of time left as free dissemination of knowledge isn’t in everyone’s interests.