The Wikisource Legal Tool gathers, wikifies, and sorts the text of a judicial decision. This script does not edit Wikisource--it is a tool to prepare material that can be manually added to Wikisource.
Wikifying and formatting edit
What it does edit
- Separates the syllabus, opinion of the court, and any concurrences or dissents
- Adds templates:
- To the Syllabus: template:header, template:USSCcase, template:CaseCaption, template:PD-USGov
- To the Opinion of the Court: template:header, template:USSCcase, template:PD-USGov
- To any Dissent or Concurrence: template:header, template:USSCcase2, template:PD-USGov
- Adds data (where available) into the above templates:
- Court
- Volume (citation)
- Reporter (citation)
- Page (citation)
- Case name
- Lower court (not always available)
- Date decided
- Date argued (not always available)
- Docket number (not always available)
- Wikifies foot notes by creating <ref> tags and ==Notes== section
- Known issue with * notes that are sometimes at the begining of an opinion. I am not sure how to handle this, since MediaWiki automatically assigns numbers to foot notes
- Wikifies links to:
- Full citation to U.S. Reporter
- Full citation to Federal Reporter
What it does not do (yet) edit
- Identify the author of the opinion of the court, dissents, or concurrences
- Identify corresponding article on Wikipedia
- Wikify links to citations to state decisions, statutes, secondary material
- Wikify short form citations or "Id."
Technical information edit
I wrote the Wikisource Legal Tool in PHP. It uses XPath to sift through the DOM tree of an HTML page. It can parse OpenJuris, and I have another version that parses some areas of Cornell's Legal Information Institute. This script is just a proof of concept--I wrote it when I should have been studying tax. If you want to help the project, please contact me.