Clicklaw Wikibooks

Clicklaw Wikibooks are collaboratively developed, plain language legal publications that are published and kept up-to-date on a wiki, where they can also be printed. They are free to access and download, and enable legal information to be shared widely with British Columbians who seek reliable, up-to-date information to address legal problems or learn about the law. Courthouse Libraries BC launched Clicklaw Wikibooks in 2012 to help lawyers and other legal organizations publish in many formats and only edit a single source. Clicklaw Wikibooks relies on the guidance of an Advisory Committee that includes contributor organizations and other stakeholders from the legal and library community.

About Clicklaw Wikibooks

Clicklaw Wikibooks are legal publications available in a range of print and digital formats. They are written to be understandable to people without a formal legal education and are focused on the laws of British Columbia. Clicklaw Wikibooks range in size from small booklets to 1,000+ page manuals. They are collaboratively developed in the sense that many different legal professionals and law-related non-profit organizations bring their legal knowledge and expertise, while Courthouse Libraries BC coordinates their efforts and manages the website. Titles in the Clicklaw Wikibooks collection may originally have existed as exclusively print publications or even stand-alone websites, but have been republished using the Clicklaw Wikibooks platform because it helps ensure that legal information is:

highly accessible both online and in print,
accurate and up-to-date, and
affordable to produce and maintain.

Clicklaw Wikibooks are an attempt to solve two central challenges in publishing legal information:

Law is constantly evolving: Legal information, to be helpful, has to be current with updates in the law. It can be cumbersome and time consuming to keep a legal publication up-to-date using the traditional book publishing model — that is, updating a word processing or page layout file; emailing versions back and forth between author, editor and reviewer; and sending a printable PDF off to the printer.
Formats are multiplying: Most legal publications are still optimized for printing, which typically compromises other formats (the web, ebooks, mobile), even as they grow in importance. The way many legal publications are produced is to format for printing, then create a PDF of the printed version, and put the PDF on the Internet. The resulting PDFs aren't easy to navigate around, to view on the screen, or to find for that matter.

Clicklaw Wikibooks try to solve these problems:

They can be updated over the Internet, by multiple contributors. The wiki platform has a robust version history and comparison feature, and changes made are instantly available to readers.
They offer a highly accessible online experience. As the wiki version is powered by the open source software MediaWiki, the software that powers the hugely popular Wikipedia, it offers a familiar, easy-to-read experience for anyone who has used Wikipedia.
They offer up an online and print version from the same source. The wiki platform can be used to generate a print version of a publication that is a professional, good quality bound publication. The MediaWiki software is free and constantly evolving, providing an affordable means to produce legal information for multiple formats.

For more on Clicklaw Wikibooks, see the Clicklaw Wikibooks FAQ.

Using Clicklaw Wikibooks

How you use Clicklaw Wikibooks depends on whether you are a member of the public who needs legal information, or a contributor (i.e. one of the authors, editors or reviewers of a Clicklaw Wikibook) who wants to edit your organization's content.

Here is a list of Clicklaw Wikibooks Guides covering how to use this website. Guides are written for users, contributors and editors, and wiki administrators, as well as generally for copyright questions, and how to print or export Clicklaw Wikibooks.

Contact

We can be reached at wikisupport@clicklaw.bc.ca.

Goals

Clicklaw Wikibooks strives to be an effective public resource for people who require legal information and a useful publishing platform for organizations who produce public legal information. We try to provide a platform that is user and contributor-centric while at the same time efficient, cost-effective, supportive of public libraries and an example of good, productive collaboration. Clicklaw Wikibooks follow best practice guidelines for online public legal education and information ("PLEI").

User-centric	Contributor-centric	Efficient & sustainable
Plain language legal information for a public audience Maximum accessibility (barriers: regional, language, literacy, disability, technology, age) Familiar and simple for end-users to use	Strong multiple format export (print and digital) from single source Simple for editors and content partners to use Develop and foster a skilled community of legal content volunteers who can work on more than one project	Easy to administer Works for most PLEI publishing needs, most of the time Helps PLEI organizations collaborate and work together Supports public libraries Cheap and efficient technology to develop and maintain Achieve economies of scale and progressive affordability Free, open source and open license

Governance

Clicklaw Wikibooks is operated and maintained by Courthouse Libraries BC with the assistance of the Clicklaw Wikibooks Advisory Committee. Members of the Advisory Committee are selected from contributor organizations and stakeholders, with an emphasis on diversity to reflect the needs and interests of public users, volunteer editors, contributor organizations and public libraries.

Selection criteria

When considering new titles to add to the Clicklaw Wikibooks collection, the Clicklaw Wikibooks Advisory Committee considers the same content criteria guidelines as Clicklaw, www.clicklaw.bc.ca, our sister website.

About the wiki platform

Clicklaw Wikibooks uses MediaWiki, a free software open source wiki platform originally for use on Wikipedia. We adapted and customized the MediaWiki platform in key ways. Only approved people can edit Clicklaw Wikibooks, and the options for downloading titles from the collection in PDF and EPUB, or for ordering them as print-on-demand books, have been streamlined. Improvements and customization are ongoing, and the Clicklaw Wikibooks Advisory Committee considers a scorecard approach balancing principled and practical considerations for technical enhancements to the platform.

Principled criteria

Alignment with user-centric needs
Alignment with contributor-centric needs
Alignment with admin-centric needs
Alignment with public libraries’ needs

Practical criteria

Cost of implementation
Ease of implementation

List of Clicklaw Wikibooks

JP Boyd on Family Law John-Paul Boyd & others	Legal Help for BC Cliff Thorstenson & others	Tenant Survival Guide TRAC	A Death in Your Family People's Law School	File:CoverConsumerLawWikibook.JPG Consumer Law Wikibook People's Law School
Driving in BC People's Law School	Human Trafficking in Canada People's Law School	Learning about the Law People's Law School	Paying Taxes in BC People's Law School	Workplace Bullying & Harassment People's Law School
Being an Executor People's Law School	Family Violence and Abuse People's Law School	Writing Your Will People's Law School	Power of Attorney People's Law School	Legal Issues in Residential Care: An Advocate's Manual BC CEAS
Child Support in BC People's Law School	Child Protection in BC People's Law School	Consequences of a Youth Record People's Law School	Dial-A-Law CBABC