2. Crowdsourcing the Wiki Way
Of the nine wiki projects operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation (“WMF”),[1] one—Wikipedia—has garnered most of the scholarly praise[2] and criticism.[3] WMF’s other projects (Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, and the Wikimedia Commons)[4] have their own communities of dedicated users, who use a common set of wiki-based tools to contribute content within the scope of their respective missions. They have so far failed, however, to capture the academic imagination in quite the same way as Wikipedia—which, like an open flame, seems to have the power to draw all the oxygen out of academic discourse on law and wiki technologies.[5] This is unfortunate, because WMF’s projects include another candidate that shares many of Wikipedia’s strengths, omits its most prominent weaknesses, and offers a natural fit with the interests and concerns of academics and others who study and value the public domain. That project is Wikisource.[6]
- ↑ See generally The Wikimedia Foundation home page, http://wikimediafoundation.org/ (last visited Aug. 13, 2009). Links to each of the Foundation’s wiki projects appear at the bottom of the Foundation’s home page, and at the bottom of the home pages of each of the respective projects. See generally Descriptive Project Summaries, http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects (last visited Aug. 13, 2009).
- ↑ See, e.g., Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 (2006) (dedicated to Wikipedia); Tim Wu, Can Wiki Travel?, Apr. 6, 2007, http://www.slate.com/id/2163727/ (2007) (law professor Tim Wu declares himself “a confessed Wikipedia addict, sometime contributor, and true believer”).
- ↑ See, e.g., Suzanna Sherry, Democracy and the Death of Knowledge, 75 U. Cin. L. Rev. 1053, 1055 (2007); Robert McHenry, The Faith-Based Encyclopedia, available at http://www.tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=111504A.
- ↑ See Michael J. Tonsing, The Wiki Family of Web Sites, Fed. Law., July 2009, at 14.
- ↑ At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the AALS Section on Internet and Computer Law where this paper (along with three others) was presented, Professor Paul Ohm observed that two of the four pieces presented by the members of the panel focused their analysis entirely on Wikipedia, signifying that perhaps the chosen theme of the Section’s panel (“Law and Wikis”) should have been revised to “Law and Wikipedia.” As discussed below, Wikipedia is, by a vast margin, the largest of WMF’s many projects (comfortably larger, indeed, than all the other WMF wikis combined), and may attract disproportionate attention for that reason alone. See infra Table 1, at 29.
Professor Ohm’s casual observation seems to have some empirical foundation. A search for “Wikipedia” in Westlaw’s JLR database on February 15, 2010 returned 2,258 “hits,” compared with just 30 for “Wikiquote,” 14 for “Wiktionary,” 10 for “Wikinews,” 8 for “Wikibooks,” 5 for “Wikimedia Commons,” 4 for “Wikiversity” (of which two appeared to be duplicates of one another), 3 for “Wikispecies” (with the same duplicates), and just 2 for “Wikisource.”
- ↑ Like all of WMF’s wikis, Wikisource consists of not one project, but many, each serving the needs of speakers of a particular language. The home page of the English-language version of Wikisource is online. See generally Wikisource Homepage, http://en.wikisource.org/ (last visited Aug. 13, 2009). At present, the English-language Wikisource library is, by several
