Who will contribute? on what platform?
Posted by Nick Holmes on August 23, 2008
Though supporters, both Geeklawyer on his blog and Nearly Legal in a recent comment are sceptical of our chances for success, referring to difficulty attracting contributions.
We already have a substantial body of authored contributions being made on blogs in particular. Nearly Legal himself has been blogging intelligent legal commentary for over 2 years; he has now also attracted joint contributors and these collective comtributions – CC licensed – now form part of the free legal web. Transform this and all similar resources to the Free Legal Web – ie repurpose them in creative ways (with permission) – and most contributions will look after themselves.
There’s reason to be optimistic too about leveraging law firm publications. These articles are written to be read, to reflect well on the authors and their firms and to gain them business. If their headlines and excerpts were syndicated by RSS, the FLW could give them wider, well-targeted, explicitly linked and attributed exposure and deliver the Google juice they desire.
Geeklawyer points to the less than succesful attempts by others to set up specialist law wikis. But although Susskind’s vision does refer to “a Wikipedia of English law”, I’m pretty certain he was using the term loosely in a generic sense. It would be a big mistake for us to think no further than using standard wiki software to ape Wikipedia for the law; crazy to suggest that an encyclopedia of UK law would magically emerge from scratch, user-generated contributions. The scale is massively smaller than Wikipedia, the level of authority needed for content is much higher; and the reasons users will contribute will be different.
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.
