Wikirate: a claims-based system for collaboratively reviewing corporate behaviour

Abstract

Wikirate.org is a community effort to review and rate companies' ethical behavior. Wikirate.org is built using Wagn, whose atomic data approach allows Wikirate contributors to integrate rich qualitative and quantitative data in innovative, accessible ways. In the qualitative realm, data can be browsed by Company or by Topic, and the site's core Articles cover the intersection of the two (eg. BP+Climate Change). Because source data in the corporate transparency realm in notoriously biased, Wikirate enhances traditional wiki mechanisms for ensuring data quality patterns by organizing Articles around citation of granular Claims, supporting discussion of and voting on these Claims, and requiring that Claims cite Sources. This organization also serves to help break down the sizable task of reviewing corporate behavior into very manageable chunks. In the quantitative realm, Wikirate will soon be introducing a Ratings system that enables participants to create both simple and formulaic metrics and allows the community to vote on the most valuable of these. The system is designed such that all metrics are created and controlled by the community, and their votes determine both the metrics' prominence on the site and the companies' transparency score.