Law X.0

PBWiki Hits 500,000 Users

Mashable reports that PBWiki, which will celebrate its third anniversay on May 31st, has crossed a major milestone, 500,000 users. Check out the recent Mashable interview with Chris Yeh of PBWiki (mp3) which provides an interesting overview of the hosted wiki space in general as well as a brief history of PBWiki in specific. [JH]

Creating Wikis

Professional Wikis
by Mark S. Choate

List Price: $39.99
Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: Wrox (December 26, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0470126906
ISBN-13: 978-0470126905

Book Description: The success of Wikipedia has proven just how effective wikis can be for collaborative editing on a large scale-larger than anyone originally thought possible. This book shows you how to install, use, manage, and extend a wiki using MediaWiki-the wiki engine used to power Wikipedia.

As each chapter builds on previous ones, tasks involving wikis progress from simple to those of increasing complexity and evolve from theory to case study. You'll learn wiki terminology and how to create user accounts and new pages, use wiki links, and find your way around the wiki. Special focus is placed on how wikis are used in software and web development projects and how their capabilities ideally suit a specific environment and audience. You'll quickly come to discover why wikis are a valuable addition for any organization that wants to increase productivity using web-based collaboration tools.

What you will learn from this book

• When to use wikis instead of a more formal content management system
• What to look for when evaluating wikis in order to avoid unexpected pitfalls
• How to install MediaWiki using Apache, PHP, MySQL(r), and other alternatives
• How wikitext allows you to edit content from any web browser and create links to other wiki pages
• Ways to comment on pages, move them, track changes, and syndicate wiki pages with RSS

This book is for programmers, developers, information architects, designers, and content authors who are looking to use wikis to improve team productivity. Knowledge of HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL is necessary.

Law Firms One-Up Each Other Behind the Scenes Through Wikipedia Edits

Interesting article from Law.com: "Big law firms may seem genteel and respectful of each other on the surface. But behind the scenes, they're secretly trying to one-up each other. Concurring Opinions breaks the story in this post, A Slow Day at the Office:  Lawyers Editing on Wikipedia. "  [RJ]

Legal Wikis on Lawyer 2 Lawyer

From the Legal Talk Network:

"On Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will explore the world of “Legal Wikis.” Are they helping or hurting the law? What does the future hold for Wikis? Are we reshaping years and years of facts through the click of a button? Join co-hosts and Law.com bloggers, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi as they hear from the experts: Martin Farley, an Intellectual Property Law librarian at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, Tom Mighell, Senior Counsel and Litigation Technology Support Coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas and Daniel N. Lewis, entrepreneur and Vice President of Business Development and General Counsel of Wikia, Inc."  [RJ]

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community

The CIA's D. Calvin Andrus has deposited The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community in SSRN. This is a very interesting early theoretical analysis of the benefits of harnessing two Web 2.0 technologies for collaborative information development. Here's the abstract:

US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

Recent theoretical developments in the philosophy of science that matured in the 1990's, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our non-intelligence National Security colleagues access to these technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the transformation.

An earlier unpublished version of this paper received the Intelligence Community’s Galileo Award for 2004. Cross-posted on Law Librarian Blog. [JH]

Ambrogi on Legal Wikis

Interesting article from Law.com:

"The engine driving collaboration on the Web is a site known as a wiki, from the Hawaiian word for fast. Attorney Robert Ambrogi tracks innovative and intriguing ways that wikis are wowing the legal profession -- from collaboratively written Web books to virtual volumes of legal research."

Includes a list of legal wikis. [RJ]

Beyond the Blog/Wiki-Web

CALI's John Mayer reflects on the post-blog/wiki-web, when these blogs and wikis and tags and RSS feeds are not artifacts in themselves, but are embedded into everything else, using time and permanence as criteria for evaluating all applications of the read/write web. Very interesting. See Embedding the Read/Write Web in ... Everything, but Especially Education.

And remember the 2007 Conference for Law School Computing is coming up. Legal Education and IT: Mirage or Oasis? will take place on June 18-20, 2007 in Las Vegas. [JH]

So You Want to Publish a Wiki...

If you are thinking about starting a wiki, your most fundamental choice is whether you (1) grab some software and host it yourself  or (2) have someone else host it for you. Read/WriteWeb's David Lenehan describes some of the hosted and software solutions for launching a wiki. You're not going to find a better source for advice so check out David's The World of Wikis. [JH]

Wikis for the Legal Profession

From the ABA's Law Practice Today: "With the increased use of "wiki" in the legal profession, there is a surprisingly great knowledge gap. What is a "wiki" and how can it prove beneficial to my work? From the basic to expansive side of this recent phenomenon, Mighell and Kennedy provide a useful tool of reference and insight."  Cross-posted on Law Librarian Blog. [RJ]