What About Law Schools on Wikipedia?

Wikipedia improvement – TrainBoard.com – Some fans of railroads are certainly concerned about train information on Wikipedia and if you follow the thread, you will see that an actual Wikipedia editor pops up as a member of the Trainboard community to try and help organize stuff. 
This gets me to wondering: what about law schools?  There is a page for American law schools but I have no way of knowing how good it is.  It appears that a lot of the work done on it is by law students or pre-law students.  There is a list of US law schools that seems pretty complete, but the qulaity of entries for individual schools varies, to say the least. IS there anyone out there in the law school community that loks after law school entries on Wikipedia?

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Being IN the Long Tail Not Profitable, But Fun Anyway

The blogs that they started live in the long tail of the blogosphere, however, and the reality is that it is difficult to make money in the long tail – Anderson’s point was that the money is to be made by selling to the long tail, not so much by existing in it. In this post we examine why that is and look at other aspects of long tail economics.

There’s No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere

OK, so law school casebooks are long tail stuff.  The money is in selling the books, not in writing them.  The value to authors in the casebook market is reputational not monetary.  But the reputational value comes from being in the long tail, not being the long tail.  In other words if you write the only casebook in area Y of the law, then it will get used, or not, because the choice is limited.  If you write a casebook in area X that is has a greater choice of titles, then your reputation is enhanced when the book is chosen over competitors.  This means that eLangdell should be looking for works in the traditionally well covered areas of the law to get started, because nothing will enhance the reputation of eLangdell authors more than having their work chosen over traditional works.

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links for 2007-11-27

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Public.Resource.Org, Fastcase In Deal To Free Case Law

Announcement

Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced today that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

I’m pretty sure that this is one of the most understated announcements I’ve seen.  To have this corpus of primary legal material freely available is simply huge.  For years scholars, students, and researchers have been struggling with ways to gain access to this material that wasn’t a violation of some big publisher’s copyright or license agreement.  IF you want a preview of the case law goodness to come, take a look at http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/ where you will find over 150,000 cases already available, plus the PHP utility used to do the transformations and a sample style sheet to control the layout and presentation.  Because P.R.O is doing the right thing, these cases are well marked-up as valid XHTML which means you cna do pretty much anything you want with them from a programmatic and display stand point.  Very, very cool.

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