Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Innovations:Collaborative Contract Editing

💡 In simple words: Contracts on WikiDeal are written together like a shared school project that anyone can help improve. The best version everyone agrees on becomes the one people use.

🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): Collaborative Contract Editing treats contracts the way Wikipedia treats articles: wiki-edited, versioned and community-validated, then endorsed by lawyers who take named responsibility. The work is organized around common contract bases, one per subject, which mature like encyclopedic articles; adaptations are validated as much as possible by lawyers, for online applications run by user groups.

Collaborative Contract Editing

Foundational innovation, WikiDeal R&D

Origin	🔵 Wikimedia Foundation
Status	Starting (July 2026, proposal)

What is it?

Collaborative Contract Editing treats contracts the way Wikipedia treats articles: they are wiki-edited, versioned, and community-validated. Any community member can propose improvements to a contract, and versions that gain endorsement become the standard reference. This intends to replace closed, lawyer-only drafting with an open, traceable, continuously improving process.

The starting hypothesis: like knowledge, agreements and deals can be drafted participatively, as citizens, and then endorsed by lawyers who take responsibility for them and provide services around them; it stops there. A fundamental principle holds through all of this: part of the platform is a wiki where anyone can participate.

The initial observation

Searching online for a contract model with guarantees is difficult today. Lawyers keep the important clauses and articulations: they have models, but do not easily share them (NDAs can be found, for example, but not much more). And the explanations around the clauses are missing: usual risks, bad practices linked to certain clauses, frequent misinterpretations, protective measures. This is what is missing, and this is what WikiDeal intends to provide.

Contract bases

The work is organized around contract bases: one common contract base per subject, with its clauses, then adaptations validated as much as possible by lawyers, for online applications run by user groups.

Contract bases also open creative possibilities:

• less usual early-termination options against compensation;
• unusual and reliable guarantees that create trust;
• linked contracts, where several contracts become a program.

Maturity of a contract base

A contract base is expected to mature like an encyclopedic article that has covered its subject: at some point, important modifications stop. The remaining adaptations mostly reduce the diversity of options: for example, termination only at term instead of "at term, or anticipated against compensation"; or four early-termination conditions instead of seven. Around a mature base, the surroundings are widely documented: compensatory measures, options, alerts, specific advice, common cases. After that, small adaptations remain possible by country, by rule set or by more specific user groups, but there is one common contract base for all.

A different architecture from Wikipedia

This content architecture differs from Wikipedia, which is made of many individual articles. WikiDeal is made of contract bases with clauses, then adaptations validated as much as possible by lawyers, for online applications run by user groups.

How it works on WikiDeal

Each contract has an editable, version-tracked page so changes are visible and reversible. Proposed improvements are reviewed by the community and, once endorsed, promoted to the recommended version. The endorsement and validation workflow connects to Peer Endorsement and is documented progressively as the platform evolves.

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See also: All innovations · Peer Endorsement · Programs · R&D Portal