transparency issues

Dear Olaf,

Thank you for your message and the time you have taken to review Wikirate. We really appreciate your feedback and in all honesty, we completely agree!

Due to our limited resources and grand (at times overwhelming) ambitions, we have, for too long, neglected our own transparency. We regret this and are working hard to change that, after all, we aim to lead by example.

Several of the points you raise were already on our agenda and are a work in progress, but let me say, those that weren’t, now are too.

In the meantime, let me provide some further clarification regarding the points you’ve raised.

One of the things we have been struggling with is how to distinguish between the different forms of ‘Wikirate’ (i.e. distinguishing between the platform, organisation, and community). To deal with this, we decided to split our communication channels in two online domains; the platform+community at https://wikirate.org/ and the organisation at https://wikirateproject.org/. As this is still a work in progress, the information you have been looking for is currently scattered across the two sites and is very difficult to find. Furthermore we recently implemented a major redesign, and some important links were missed so we are very grateful that you noticed!

Let me sign-post a few pages that begin to tackle the points you raised:

• https://wikirate.org/About_Wikirate - from this page (on the main platform) you can navigate to the organisational site: https://wikirateproject.org
• https://wikirateproject.org/support/ and https://wikirate.org/Donate - cover 1) who is paying for this website / who are donors and 2) our legal entity/registration (for the latter, also see: https://wikirate.org/Legal )
• https://wikirate.org/Donation_and_Grant_Policy - covers our funding policy
• https://wikirateproject.org/about/our-team/ - covers who is behind the organisation and is maintaining the site
• https://wikirate.org/Terms_of_Use - begins to cover 1) modus operandi and 2) quality criteria and procedures
• https://.wikirate.org/Privacy_Policy - explains how we approach the privacy of our users. More specifically, we have no verification of the identity of contributors because all data we host on the platform is citing public sources. In this regard we operate very similar to Wikipedia and ensure data reliability through the sourcing mechanism, not through knowing the exact identity of a contributor.

Regarding ‘where to complain if info is not correct’, we would encourage users to correct the data they found to be incorrect directly on the platform (citing the source with the correct information). However if, for any reason, a user would prefer to flag dougy data to the Wikirate team we can always be reached (also for other questions or feedback) at info[at]wikirate.org or using the contact form: https://wikirate.org/Contact_Wikirate .

We hope this begins to answer your request for more transparency on our part and if you have any further questions, we would be happy to provide more clarification.

And finally, once our information architecture has been improved and our organisational disclosure has become available on our platform in a more transparent way, we’d really appreciate it if we could reach out to you for another review. Community feedback and perspectives are invaluable to our success.

Thanks again for your message - we hope to stay in touch!

Best regards,

Laureen - on behalf of the entire Wikirate team