The LexPublica Blog

When we first introduce people to the idea of LexPublica, a common assumption is that we’ll be like Wikipedia.

It’s not a bad assumption. Wikipedia has been phenomenally successful and we could do worse than to emulate them.

The challenge we’d face with trying to be like Wikipedia is that they use a “release, then review” content creation process.^[1]

The “release, then review” approach works well for content where the average reader can evaluate the quality of the article. For example: in a typical Wikipedia article, a reader has many ways to determine how much trust to place in the  information provided. Readers can check citations, cross-reference the information provided in the article with other sources, review the change history and discussions, and so on.

While it is relatively easy for the average person to verify a mundane encyclopedia article, most of us can’t verify legal information (or other specialized and complex knowledge like software or medical information). A consequence of this is that Wikipedia’s model is a poor fit for LexPublica. If we chose to release agreement templates before they were reviewed, we’d be inviting disaster for everyone who chose to use them.

In the Linux and open source software world, most projects fend off disaster by releasing only after review. In Linux’s example, multiple reviews are performed on code (and indirectly, contributors) before it is released to a large group of self-selecting testers for another review. Only after this chain of reviews is code released for general use.

LexPublica will be following a model much like Linux’s, with contributions being reviewed by trusted community members before they are released for general use. These reviews will be part of a larger process to create and improve content. In the coming posts, we’ll write more about this process and the tools that we’ll need to support it.

1. By “release, then review”, we mean that content is published and, over time, may be reviewed by readers and Wikipedia community members. This model is changed in some situations, such as when an article has a chronic vandalism issue. [↩]