Judgepedia, Collaboration, and Liberty

March 31, 2008

Judgepedia

By Michael A. Tams

One of the more interesting new media innovations of the last few years has been the rise and adoption of wikis as open collaboration projects.

Wikipedia, of course, is the best-known and with good reason. Started in 2001, Wikipedia boasts 2,307,939 articles and over 6.7 million registered users. It’s the gold standard, and has spawned wikis world-wide through the sharing of its open-source software.

One such wiki is a project of the Sam Adams Alliance called Judgepedia.com, and I’m the Director of this site. Like any wiki, Judgepedia is community-built and policed. Anyone can contribute to a page, and anyone can edit a page. We adhere to the core wiki principles of neutral point of view, no original research, and verifiable sources. But like most wikis out there, we’re serving a niche; we live in a customizable world, and how one gets their information is no exception. Our niche is everything on judges, law and the judiciary.

Collaboration through wikis offers an opportunity to leverage the knowledge of thousands (even millions) of people who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to work together on a common goal. The collaboration at Judgepedia is no different. We’re relying on people in every state in the country - and every county in those states – to inform us, the interested public, about the judges in their community.

And the obvious connection to liberty is that most judges are elected officials that few people know anything about. They typically run for long terms, and their actions on the bench are difficult for voters to find out about and sometimes harder to understand. In this regard, there’s a real risk that they could be less accountable to the voters who put them in office.

Enter Judgepedia: with an internet connection, soon people all over the country will have a resource to access and get the information they need to make intelligent voting decisions when it comes to judges.

Editor’s Note: For an example of a solid Judgepedia page, see Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Posted by Eric Odom | Filed Under Features