Authority and attribution

David Pearce, creator of the UKPatents wiki, writes on the IPKat:

I am a little sceptical about the possibility in the foreseeable future of a wiki-type ‘free legal web’, as envisaged by Nick Holmes (see the vision here), and also doubt whether there is sufficient impetus for the more fantastic-sounding vision of a Wikipedia of English law, as suggested by Richard Susskind (coincidentally, only a couple of months before the ukpatents wiki was born). After all, for such a resource to be realisable, the professional time of real people would be needed to create and maintain it, and those people really need to be trained lawyers specialist in their field, and not just technicians or students. Where is such a resource to be found?

I should point out that I have not myself suggested the Free Legal Web should be “a Wikipedia” nor that a wiki is necessarily the right platform.

The Free Legal Web will have to have authority and that will only accrue if – as David says – contributors are “trained lawyers, specialist in their field” and if their contributions cannot be hacked around by all and sundry. So, contributions and edits will need to be restricted via user permissions and attributed to their authors, with links to profiles and author websites to affirm their credentials.

Not only will this establish the necessary authority, but also it will encourage contributions. As Francis Davey comments on the IPKat post

A key difficulty with wikis is (inter alia) a lack of individual recognition. One of the drivers for many lawyers to write is just exactly the marketing/reputation that it affords. A wiki ends up submerging the author’s contributions to the extent that it is hard to gain that same reputation. Or at least I think that it is not sufficiently foregrounded.

If FLW articles are attributed to their authors and linked to their websites, contributors will gain the recognition and the Google juice they crave.

And I repeat my premise that we already have a substantial free legal web (no caps): there are already thousands of authoritative, free-access articles written by “trained lawyers, specialist in their field”. Surely we can secure many of those via CC for reuse on the Free Legal Web?

Who will contribute? on what platform?

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.