This page is now out of date. Please go to Using Wikirate for an updated version of this page

 

 

Wikirate has two complementary parts which we refer to as the Wiki and Rate sides of the site. 

The Wiki side is where we deal with textual information. People make individual Note about a company's behaviour which can describe anything that they've done. We also write Review which summarise what we know about a company's behaviour in relation to a Topic.

The Rate side is where we deal with 'quantitative' or standardised information. Metrics are standardised ways of measuring some aspect of a company's performance, they are a fair way of comparing companies' behaviour because they ask the same questions of each company. Metrics can be numerical (e.g. 'number of employees', 'Co2 emissions') or categorical (e.g. 'conducts animal testing', 'publishes list of suppliers'). You can vote on metrics (or drag them to the top of the list) to track them as you browse companies, and these votes also make the metric more likely to be shown at the top of the list for other users or to appear on our home page.

Metric values show how a company performed on the metric in a particular year. One of the best ways for the Wikirate community to contribute is by adding new metric values - every new value expands our knowledge about a company and makes comparison with other companies more informative. A metric's page should have instructions for how to assess the value a particular company should receive.

Some of our metrics are not open for public editing because they represent scores that were awarded by a particular group and we can't yet reproduce their methodology. In the next few months we will be adding features which allow you to create company ratings using these metrics on Wikirate.

Note and Metric values should each have at least one source, the same source can be used on both the Wiki and Rate parts of the site.

Review should cite notes and metric values related to the company, we want everything on Wikirate to be based on evidence which a reader can easily access.

 

The Wiki Side

Getting Started

The best way to get involved in Wikirate right now is by contributing to Review.  This includes writing them, of course, but there are also many smaller steps, like:

• adding Sources
• adding Notes
• voting on either/both

These contributions may seem small, but the great power of Wikirate is that it creates a system where small contributions can add up to unprecedented levels of corporate transparency and accountability.

  

If you have any questions about how to participate on Wikirate you can leave a comment below or drop us an email at info@wikirate.org.

 

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Core Concepts

Companies

 

Topics

 

Overviews

 

Notes

Sources

 

Voting

You can vote on notes and sources by clicking the voting buttons beside them. Up-votes increase the score for that item by one point - use these for Note you think are important and Sources that are credible. Down-votes decrease the item's score by one point, use these for poor quality Note and Sources - but remember, a Wikirate user submitted each item, if you think its not suitable for Wikirate it would help them if you explain why you're down-voting it.

 

Discussion

We are a new community and together we're still figuring out how to make Wikirate great. If you have a comment or question about anything on the site, start a Discussion about it! When you're voting on notes or sources - if you have clear reasons for your votes it would help others if you make a comment about them.

 

Making companies clearer is not an easy task and nobody has all the answers for how to go about it - but we can figure out these answers together.

 

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Navigating the Site

Editing content, particularly Review, is an important part of users' activity on Wikirate. When signed into your account you can open the editing interface by double-clicking on the content you want to edit.

 

When browsing Note, there is a citations box beside each one - clicking on this box opens a menu where you can see Review that have cited the note or could cite it. Teal boxes indicate that the Note has been cited at least once; pink boxes indicate that the Note has not yet been cited.  Linking to the Review from these boxes provides a simple cut-and-paste option for making a citation.

 

When viewing these Review, relevant un-cited Note appear below the overview text, you can click the clipboard icon () to copy this citation to your clipboard, then when you're editing the Review you can just paste this citation syntax in wherever you want to cite the Note.

 

There are buttons on many pages that allow you to add Note or Sources related to the content you're currently viewing. You can also add Note and Sources about any Companies and Topics from the "Add" drop-down menu at the top of the screen.

 

When adding a Note, the more information you can provide the better. Each Note must have a Source (you can add this at the same time by pasting a link into the appropriate field). If you can also tag your note with a Company and Topic, that means it can be shown in the appropriate places on the site. On top of this, we'd like all our Note to be labelled with the Year they relate to (under "add more info") because a Company's behaviour changes over time and we want to know when a particular Note was true. For Note based on a large Source (e.g. a Company's CSR report) it would also be really helpful if you could note what part of the document the Note is derived from - the optional "Basis" field is the place to put this kind of information.

 

There are also some important options available when you hover over the icon in the top-right corner of any item of content (). You can view the edit history of the item in the view->history menu, from here you can see who has edited the item and what they have changed. You can also follow any item on Wikirate - when you follow an item you will receive e-mail notifications whenever it is edited or when someone makes a comment about it.