Help:FAQ
From SeLawWiki
Introduction
what is this thing?
this is the continuation of the project at alex rowland's law notes. that site allowed me to post my own notes/briefs/blogs/outlines, as well as those e-mailed to me. this site takes that idea a step further, allowing everyone in the class to make pages and edit each other's work all on their own. you can post your own briefs or blogs or notes or outlines, but you can also add and edit those of others. if you log in, you can create any page and edit almost any page--the only exception is my blog and the structure of the home page. you could even edit this page to read, "my name is alex and i am a big fat idiot." but your username would show up in the editing history (see the "history" link above), allowing me to respond, "no, [your name here] is a big fat idiot."
how will it be used?
although ostensibly that's up to everyone else, it will continue to serve all the functions of my old law notes web site, including outlines for all classes, notes for every session, and briefs for all of the cases. my suggestions: write your own blogs, post e-mails from professors or ta's, create pages about topics that need discussion, etc.
doesn't this encourage people to be lazy?
no. the feedback i received from people as well as the page load statistics indicated that people almost exclusively used the old site to catch up on notes for when they were absent, to compare briefs and outlines to those they had already written, or to read my blog for whatever asshole comments i had made that day. the site also serves some pedagogical functions that can't easily be accomplished by other means:
- everyone can read each other's material to catch mistakes.
- students who are shy or less aggressive have access to a more accessible forum.
- professors, if they choose to look, can see what their students are taking away from the cases and classes.
- if you wanted to say something in class but couldn't or didn't, there's a big blog on the front page.
what's the most important thing to know?
wikis must operate under some form of creative commons or public domain copyright in order to function. i have chosen the most lax copyright scheme, that of the public domain. this means that anything you post or edit is released into the world without any claim of ownership. i don't think anyone was planning on selling their first year law notes for profit, but if you were, then you don't want to post them here.
what's the second most important thing to know?
you cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot copy and paste copyrighted material. this means anything you got from padi or the bookstore or whatever. if you didn't create it, or copy it from wikipedia, it probably can't be reprinted here. some professors, however, including Christian Turner, treat all of their class notes and similar uploads/e-mails as public domain. these files can be uploaded freely.
any other rules?
no.
really?
i doubt you could say anything worse than what i've said already.
how do i know this site won't disappear tomorrow?
i make regular database backups as well as backups of uploaded multimedia files. these can be e-mailed or burned to a cd for anyone (at the school) who asks. theoretically, you could use the database file to clone this web site in under an hour with very little technical knowledge.
ok, how do i use it?
i'm planning to write a page at Help:Contents to provide a crash course in page editing. you can probably figure out most of it just by clicking "edit" at the top of a page and carefully reading the pages, but there are plenty of help pages at wikipedia, including their editing FAQ, which explains most of it. the most annoying or strange thing when editing is that you have to hit enter twice to start a new paragraph. other stuff is pretty easy. linking to a page called "Alex's Blog" requires that you write the title of the page surrounded by two brackets, like this: [[Alex's Blog]]. creating headings requires that you surround the heading with a few equals signs, with two on each side for a level two heading. the "introduction" heading at the top of this page looks like this: ==Introduction==. and of course there's buttons over the editing box that do both of these things automatically if you just click the right button.
so go ahead and play around. you can't break it.
why did you make all this?
although i made up the other questions, people actually ask me this a lot. i have a lot of reasons. i'll write them down later.
who can access or edit it?
as you've already noticed, everyone on the entire internet can look at it. editing is restricted to law students and people with J.D.'s.
do i have a personal page?
yes. if you click your name on the top right, you can see it. if you change your username in the URL box to someone else's, or click their name in the editing history, you can see their personal page. editing someone else's personal page causes the server to e-mail that person with a notification. there may also be professor pages, for example, article names of professors Anne Dupre or Ron Ellington might have links to all of the pages relating to their classes.
