Site of the Week: Wex

From the great team at Cornell's Legal Information Institute comes Wex. They label it "everyone's resource for law learning." Wex attempts to harness the collaborative power of wiki technology into an authoritative online legal disctionary and encyclopedia. If you are not familiar with wikis, you should check out Wikipedia as an extremely useful example. It is "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" online. That description probably sends shivers down that backs of lawyers who want authoritation and correct information, not the last poster-editor's biased opinion. But Wikipedia has turned out to be a great resource, particularly with acronyms and new concepts that may not have made the printed encyclopedias yet. It is self-correcting. Someone may edit it to say the Allies lost WW II or something equally stupid, but someone else will repair it in minutes. The LLI folks are trying to evolve and improve this model by assembling a team of approved expert contributors with editing privileges. This approach makes a lot of sense to me. We'll see how the project goes. There is the potential for this to become the Black's Law Dictionary of the Web.