Clicklaw Wikibooks

Clicklaw Wikibooks are collaboratively developed, plain language legal publications that are born-wiki and can also be printed.

Clicklaw Wikibooks are provided as part of the Clicklaw program operated by Courthouse Libraries BC to help the public in British Columbia find and use legal information. The main Clicklaw website offers a single window into legal information for the public from dozens of organizations in BC.

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

Learn & Teach Series

The Learn & Teach Series on Clicklaw Wikibooks features resources for educators and learners on legal topics.

Law-Related ESL Lessons People's Law School

Settlement Workers Guide Immigrant PLEI Consortium

What are Clicklaw Wikibooks?

Clicklaw Wikibooks provide legal information for the public in British Columbia in a way that is:

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

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

1. 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.
2. 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.

How do I use Clicklaw Wikibooks?

How you use Clicklaw Wikibooks depends on whether you are a member of the public who needs legal information, or someone with a Clicklaw Wikibooks account (i.e. one of the authors, editors or reviewers of a Clicklaw Wikibook) who wants to know how to edit 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.

Goals

Clicklaw Wikibooks seeks to be a resource focused on the needs of the public (site users who require legal information) and contributor organizations who produce public legal information. We strive 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.

User-centric	Contributor-centric	Efficient & sustainable
Plain language legal information for a public audience consistent with 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 for CLBC 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

Selection criteria

When selecting new contributors to work with and titles to add to the Clicklaw Wikibooks collection, we adopt the same content criteria guidelines as Clicklaw. When prioritizing titles, and even technical features and enhancements to the platform, we employ a scorecard approach balancing principled and practical considerations.

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