Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/32

622 public, and the successes the site’s users have achieved to date offer a hint of its promise.

C. Pros and Cons
Crowdsourcing methods represent territory mostly unexplored by the various projects currently working to provide open access to legal source materials. The “peer production” approach, which has been ably used to create a wide variety of other informational goods, holds at least some promise as a tool for making legal and historical materials available more widely and without restriction.

Most fundamentally, crowdsourcing techniques alleviate resource constraints that otherwise limit the scope and operations of typical open-access efforts. Many of the organizations that have launched legal open-access sites are arms of educational or nonprofit institutions, and their reach is constrained by available resources.

Reduced organizational overhead is a second identifiable benefit of crowdsourcing. As the example of the Statutes at Large illustrates, launching a new crowdsourced open-access initiative is a project within the means of a dedicated individual acting on his or her own initiative. The need to build committee structures or to lobby for consensus-based decision-making is not an impediment; texts within any single user’s areas of interest and expertise may be added to a project almost effortlessly, with other users of the site free to contribute as their own interest and curiosity dictates. Inviting interested members of the legal community and the public to collaborate in building a free commons of legal source materials removes the resource constraints of any single organizing entity as a limiting factor.

The wiki-based architecture of a project like Wikisource offers another potential benefit in the form of reducing barriers to participation. Wikisource’s approach differs markedly from Distributed Proofreaders’: the open wiki-based architecture invites and facilitates participation by users of widely varying expertise. Some users may be competent in proofreading the scanned OCR text and marking rudimentary corrections, others may be knowledgeable about the MediaWiki formatting markup used across all the WMF sites, others may excel at categorization and indexing, and still others may have the type of skills that are necessary to program templates or