Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/30

620 far to at least demonstrate the viability of crowdsourced proofreading of legal texts, specifically works that would be unlikely to be included at Distributed Proofreaders. Wikisource can also serve as a repository for legal scholarship that meets the site’s inclusion criteria—thus potentially bringing together scholarship and primary source materials in a way not presently replicated by any other open-access repository.

By virtue of its design, Wikisource comports with many (although certainly not all) of Professor Ian Gallacher’s proposed design standards for open-access archives of primary legal source materials. Wikisource’s collection is universally accessible worldwide. It can be presented in a variety of formats (or downloaded freely and further processed to meet a user’s specific presentation needs), and its contents are open to indexing by Google or other standard search engines. The output format of any work hosted on Wikisource is an XHTML web page, an open vendor-neutral format that nevertheless enables preservation of a great deal of the original work’s formatting. The Wikimedia Foundation’s globally distributed server architecture yields adequate response speeds in ordinary use. The site offers permanence in the form of downloadable snapshots of the full database as it existed at various points in time; if