Wiki Law School:MPEP Outline

From wikilawschool.net. Wiki Law School does not provide legal advice. For educational purposes only.
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

The Wiki Law School MPEP Outline Project is meant to eventually become a complete, free study tool for those preparing to take the patent bar. I started the project by importing the full, raw text of the MPEP. Now, anyone is welcome and encouraged to participate in the process of turning that text into an outline.

Because outlining is a great way to learn material such as that found in the MPEP, by contributing to this project, you will be learning the MPEP. Our goal is to have an outline that covers everything that one needs to know for the patent bar in the most concise, easiest to understand manner possible. This is a monumental task but the result will be a completely free patent bar review course. Considering the cost of most commercially-available patent bar review courses, I think that the idea of a wiki patent bar review is a very good one.

Jump In!

How can you help? There are a few ways:

  • MPEP Outline: The biggest task by far is the MPEP outline. Each chapter started out as text straight out of the MPEP.
    • Section headings need to be inserted (by formatting the already-existent section headings to become wiki headings, see Help:Formatting)
      • This will make the subsequent steps easier; once the outlines are parsed into sections, one may edit only one section at a time which will simplify the task and allow multiple people to work on a singler chapter simultaneously.
    • Each chapter in the MPEP Outline needs to be downsized. This means:
      • cutting out unnecessary text (there is a lot of this, such as examiner forms, etc.), and
      • summarizing the important text in a way that is understandable and as simple as possible (not an easy task!).
    • Each chapter needs to be formatted and cleaned up. Paragraphs may need to be arranged to be aesthetically pleasing.
    • The cutting-down and summarizing needs to occur before the formatting can, as it would be a waste of time to format text that is destined for the chopping block.
    • The statutory sections should not be summarized. We need to format and clean them, but leave the statutory language. If you think that we should only include a few of the statute sections and delete the rest, please comment at the talk page.
  • Test Preparation Page: The MPEP project also includes a Patent Bar Preparation page with test-preparation tips, study schedule, and anything else necessary for those preparaing for the patent bar. This page will obviously be much less work than the MPEP Outlines, but it will be necessary to make sure that this project is a complete solution for patent bar preparation.

Note: As each MPEP chapter is very large, and editing such large pages is slow and cumbersome, we are in the process of breaking down each chapter into its component sections and including them in the main chapter. Please feel free to ask questions on the discussion page or the admin's talk page. Don't worry about messing it up, just start editing. We're just glad you're here!

If you have comments, suggestions, advice, ideas, etc., please visit the Wiki Law School talk:MPEP Outline page to discuss.

Links