The vision for Wikirate is not only to be the go-to place for information on company social and environmental practices, but also to use such information to rate companies according to such criteria. Hence the name Wikirate. Generally these kind of ratings are referred to as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) ratings.
We believe that doing CSR ratings via wiki-style crowdsourcing has not been tested yet. The many benefits of a crowdsourced rating convinced the Wikirate team that it is worth the effort to set one up. Not only would such a rating be by definition the ultimate in transparency on how it is derived, it also would allow anyone to actually drill down and read the stories and bits of information behind the ratings to make sense out of it. And by allowing anyone to participate in the rating process we give the ratings users a feeling of ownership, which hopefully results in increased involvement, which in turn leads to more ethical buying decisions, and ultimately provides companies with additional incentive to act sustainably.
We have some great ideas about how the rating should work, and invite you to discuss these with us! Once we feel that the concept is developed enough to make it actionable, and once we have built a small community to get it started, we will seek funds to get it implemented on this site.