Professor Ben Alarie at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (my alma mater, I’m proud to say) has started a tax wiki, which is meant to help “Canadians confused with complicated tax laws”.
I wish Professor Alarie luck with this enterprise. I remember wanting to create something like this at the Toronto law firm where I began my career in the mid-90s. My idea was stillborn because the tools didn’t exist to create a wiki, and HTML hacking was too much overhead for a busy associate.
I remember trying to start a mailing list on tax issues among young tax lawyers in Toronto. The participation was minimal. I think the lawyers were too busy, and, if one were to spend time sharing knowledge, it was better done through an article for the OBA or the CTF. I think the latter is still true, by the way. For all our talk about Web 2.0, Twitter, blogs and wikis, something printed on dead trees still seems to matter most.
Usenet (now Google Groups) has had a Canadian tax forum for some time, but its discourse tends to be dominated by kooks. The last time I visited, some serious questions were asked and sometimes serious answers were given. But a lot of the air was taken up by those peddling conspiracy theories about the illegality of our current tax regime.
Wikis have certain technical advantages over a Google group or a blog for that matter. I hope the tax wiki succeeds. I wonder, however, who will contribute to it. My experience suggests that it won’t be busy tax professionals when the prestige for sharing still comes from articles published in traditional media.
