authoring help

At the outset we considered simply adding to the law entries in Wikipedia, but we decided against it, temporarily, for several reasons:

From Wex, everyone's resource for law learning

what are the categories?

Wex currently employs two systems for categorizing entries:

We've made it easy to link Wex articles to a rich collection of legal resources outside of Wex itself. Here are instructions for a number of commonly-used outside collections and resources. If you know of other, stable collections of legal information on the Web that you think Wex authors might be interested in, please let us know.

This is a series of stylistic tips:

Various types of editing help are available:

From Wex, everyone's resource for law learning

Deciding what to write

You can find some thoughts about this in the page on getting started as an author

The mechanics

Mechanically, starting a new article is easy:

General

For the time being, the ability to make and edit contributions is loosely limited to a pool of invited author/editors, which you may join (mailto:join-wex@www.law.cornell.edu)].

Help is available on the following topics:

Help:Searching provides help with finding things in Wex;
• Help:Editing includes general help with editing mechanics as well as Wex and law-specific things; -->
• Getting started as an author makes useful suggestions about what you might write

What is Wex?

WEX is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia. It is intended for a broad audience of people we refer to as "law novices" -- which at one time or another describes practically everyone, even law students and lawyers entering new areas of law. No doubt purists will be quick to point out the differences between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. We deliberately blur the distinction, as we are interested in providing objective, useful material in a range of formats. (See Why bother?.)