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Academic Integrity

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The Legal Information Institute

Client

Tom Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, trb2@cornell.edu.

The Legal Information Institute

Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute (LII) is a pre-eminent publisher of open access electronic legal information; it is one of the most popular places for lawyers and the public to gain access to legal information. The institute operates the most heavily-trafficked web site at Cornell. It accounts for over 20 percent of Cornell's Web traffic, reaches users in more than 200 countries and territories, and receives more than a million page views each day. The LII is also a leader in developing applications that work with legal information and make it more accessible to the public.

In previous years, there have been several successful CS 5150 projects for the Legal Information Institute.

Wiki Incentive System

One of the LII's most popular offerings is WEX, a kind of legal Wikipedia to which qualified individuals may contribute, including practicing lawyers, legal academics, law librarians, or experts in allied fields such as accounting, public health, and so on. Contribution is limited to persons that the LII "admits", typically via membership in its directory of lawyers, or via membership in allied organizations such as the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction.

The LII wishes to build a system of incentives that will reward high-quality participation in the wiki, and permit them to encourage particular types of behavior and contribution. They have worked out a system of possible incentives based on ideas drawn from disparate sources (online role-playing games, customer-reward systems like frequent-flyer programs, mobile application/games such as FourSquare, and so on) and wish to implement this system on the existing Drupal architecture. The rewards are of four types:

a) Simple grants of "points" for a particular, detectable action. b) Simple grants of status, generally given as a reward for participating in something, or given in recognition of some accomplishment (badges) c) Variable "points" rewards based on quality and extent of contribution d) Bonus rewards calculated as some percentage of c), based on some desirable pattern of behavior (e.g., consistent, sustained contribution in a particular subject-matter area; contribution leading to increased traffic, etc.).

"Quality of contribution" is of course an interesting thing to calculate, and system design will need to include the selection of methods for calculating contribution quality that are both practical and difficult to abuse; lawyers are highly competitive and like to game systems.

Such systems can really only be tested in use over time, and so the rewards system must be "tunable" via convenient administrative interfaces. It must also interact in various ways with the wiki's user-management, profile, and authentication systems, and (via a well-understood RESTful API) with systems operated by various of business partners.

The wiki is Drupal-based, and so the programming will necessarily be in PHP, within the Drupal framework. It is possible that some existing Drupal modules may provide a starting point; there are some that seem applicable.