---
title: The All Writs Act on Wikipedia v. legal academic reach
date: '2016-02-18'
tags:
- law
- wikipedia
draft: false
legacy_url: https://lu.is/2016/02/the-all-writs-act-on-wikipedia-v-legal-academic-reach/
legacy_source: wordpress
---

Legal friends! The world needs you. Here's the graph of readership of [All Writs Act on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Writs_Act):

[![Pageviews Analysis-All Writs Act](../../assets/images/Pageviews-Analysis-All-Writs-Act-510x357.png)](http://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#start=2016-02-08&end=2016-02-17&project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&pages=All_Writs_Act)That's 45,035 reads *yesterday* (by humans, not bots).((Big thanks to the tech team for figuring out how to differentiate - not something we could do until fairly recently, at least for public stats!)) That would put it 5th on SSRN's [*all-time* legal download list](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/topten/topTenResults.cfm?groupingId=201&netorjrnl=ntwk), right between William Landes and Cass Sunstein. Not bad company! Or in other words: anything you fix in this article in the next day or two is likely to be the most-read thing you ever write.

The article has been [edited 39 times](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=All_Writs_Act&type=revision&diff=705641010&oldid=642896887) since the Apple letter was published. So it is a lot better than two days ago. But it could still use a lot of love - history, applicability outside of the Apple situation, etc. Contribute!

Since lawyers are particularly concerned about citation, it is worth mentioning that the editing experience *especially when adding citations* has become vastly better in the past year - in most cases for articles on SSRN, simply dropping the link into our citation editor will get you a fully-fleshed out and formatted citation (with thanks to our friends at [Zotero](https://www.zotero.org/)!)