WikiRate Insights
Transforming WikiRate ESG Platform User Experience to Maximise Reliable Data Insights
For too long actionable data about the behavior of companies has been hidden behind the paywalls of commercial data providers. As a result only those with sufficient resources were able to advocate and shape improvements in corporate practice. Since launching in 2016, WikiRate.org has become the world’s largest open source registry of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data with nearly 1 million data points for over 55,000 companies. Through the open data platform anyone can systematically gather, analyze and discuss publicly available information on company practices, joining current debates on corporate responsibility and accountability.
By bringing this information together in one place, and making it accessible, comparable and free for all, we aim to provide society with the tools and evidence it needs to spur corporations to respond to the world's social and environmental challenges. Homing in on the usability of the platform, this project will tackle some of the most crucial barriers for users when it comes to gathering and extracting the data, whilst boosting reuse of the open source platform for other purposes.
- The project's own website: https://wikirate.org
Why does this actually matter to end users?
Online search and discovery reaches further than the search bar in your browser. There are all sorts of places where people can come together to share knowledge and store information for others to sift through, looking for a particular name, email address or useful snippet. One of these places is a wiki, of which the free community-backed encyclopedia Wikipedia is the most prominent example. On a wiki, people can effectively organize their own knowledge base, decide how their information is organized and linked, making it easily findable. Wiki's are used by organizations, governments and businesses everywhere, sometimes storing data essential for everyday operations, or with sensitive credentials. Some cities have their own wiki's, containing rich localized content useful for inhabitants, shop owners and tourists.
Wikis are also a perfect place to crowdsource information that was previously scattered and hard to comprehend. That is what WikiRate.org has been doing for environmental, social and governance data about companies. Collecting and organizing this data in a meaningful way enables researchers, activists and journalists to better understand the impact of businesses on our society and environment. Through this project Wikirate will make it easier to gather and extract this information and also allow others to leverage the technology behind Wikirate and start a wiki of their own.
Run by WikiRate
This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.
