This content is edited and updated by the Wex Definitions Team. The Wex Definitions Team is a group of Cornell Law Students organized and supervised by LII Original Content Collections Manager Nichole McCarthy to provide enhanced definitions of important legal terms and concepts to aid the general public in understanding them. The goal of the Wex project is to use law students to demystify legal language to the best of our collective ability. Nothing in Wex should ever be construed as legal advice, nor should it be considered to be the position or opinion of Cornell University, Cornell Law School, or the faculty of either.
Rationale
Any collection of information that is collaboratively edited, as Wex is, has to strike a balance between the scale and quality of its offerings. That balance is affected strongly by the way it conceives and governs its pool of author/editors.
We agree with the founders of Wikipedia that materials that are left open to edit will, in general, evolve into better and more authoritative resources over time. However, this approach raises serious policing issues in the short term. Some are quality-related; others have to do with problems of objectivity or of inappropriate use of the encyclopedia as a platform for advertising. The LII has a very small staff, and would find such problems difficult to control.
We also believe that a selective author pool, while comparatively limited in the volume of material it can generate, will generate higher-quality material in the short term. For these reasons, we've opted to keep the authoring pool selective for now.
The goal of Wex is to be informative, objective, and balanced. We are not interested in contributors who have some political or intellectual axe to grind. While it's fine to participate for reputational reasons, that should not be your primary motivation. In our experiences, it shows in the final submission.
[Last updated in July of 2024 by the Wex Definitions Team]