Wikirating:Summary
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[edit] What is Wikirating?
Wikirating is an online community credit rating platform. It aims to be an independent and transparent source of credit rating information, issued, reviewed and corrected by a worldwide community of individuals and experts. Wikirating is an independent project and is not connected in any way to Wikipedia or to Wikimedia Foundation.
[edit] Why Wikirating?
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The recent financial crisis and the resulting economic collapse have shown a serious lack of transparency, efficiency and neutrality regarding assessments on financial risks. Banks, companies and even countries have based their risk and credit estimations on financial data provided by few major and well established rating agencies, and it is now obvious that these ratings were not reliable and that rating methods needs to be drastically improved and controlled. The exaggerated power and influence of the credit rating industry has strongly motivated the idea of Wikirating. The analyses on credit worthiness of countries and governments issued by the rating industry have been too long over rated, and whereas governments are trying to regulate the rating and assessments activities, Wikirating offers a platform where anyone can contribute for better, open and more transparent credit risk assessment.
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[edit] The Vision
In the very first place Wikirating aims at federating a community of people who want to participate in providing better, more transparent and open financial rating data and methods. Our mission is to give everyone a chance to contribute to this project, and our vision is that a community of worldwide individuals and experts might have much more influence than public attempts to regulate the rating industry. The short term goal is to reach a community of active users to the Wikirating project, the middle and long term goal is to make Wikirating a serious alternative to the current private rating agencies.
[edit] What does Wikirating provide?
The Wikirating platform offers the following features and set of information:
- Credit ratings of countries, companies and structured finance products based on the credit rating methods published on Wikirating
- The credit rating methods Sovereign Wikirating Index (SWI) and Corporation Wikirating Index (CWI) (under development - join the discussion); these are transparent and understandable credit rating models created by the initiators of Wikirating
- The credit rating methods Polling (for countries) and Polling (for corporations). With these methods anyone can issue ratings in a very simple and uncommitted way. The rating polling methods measure the community’s opinion regarding the creditworthiness of countries and corporations
- A forum to discuss credit rating topics and to share and exchange ideas and feedback with other community members
Of course the principle is that much more content will be developed by the community.
[edit] The wiki concept
Wikirating is based on the MediaWiki platform, the same used by Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. As with Wikipedia, everything posted, published, added or modified by members is reviewed by the entire community. This is the force of applying the wiki concept to credit ratings: submitting rating methods or issuing ratings will be reviewed, corrected and sharpened by the entire Wikirating community.
[edit] Volunteering for Wikirating
Next to building a strong community of active users to contribute to credit ratings data, sources and methodologies, we are looking for volunteers with technical skills to help us develop new features and functions on the Wikirating platform. If you are interested in volunteering in the technical area, do not hesitate to contact us and to ask us for our technical specifications.
[edit] The rewards program
In contrast to many other wiki's, we want to reward our active community members. Indeed, the success of Wikirating depends on the community's contributions and as soon as Wikirating will reach some kind of critical mass (in term of registered users, posts and contributions) we intend to develop a license model for commercial use of Wikirating. In that sense, we believe it is more than fair to distribute part of the generated revenue to the most active users. As of yet we have not completely defined the exact rules since we are not actively focused on generating revenue at this stage. However we believe in the success of Wikirating and we want to be fair with the members who also believe in Wikirating and who will actively contribute to Wikirating. Therefore, each of your contributions will be counted from the beginning, based on a point system.
Logically, we will be able to reward you depending on the revenue Wikirating will generate. We aim at being fully transparent and providing the maximum clarity in our financial statements.
We also intend to donate part of our revenue to charity organizations. As we believe that education a driver of utmost importance, we have built a partnership with Room to Read, a charity organization which actively promotes the education of children and especially of girls in several developing countries (see www.roomtoread.org).
[edit] Who is behind Wikirating?
Wikirating has been initiated in spring 2010 by Dorian Credé, in the middle of the financial crisis, which turned into an economic collapse few months after. Wikirating is a private and independent initiative, auto-financed by the creator. Dorian, founder and chairman of Wikirating, owns a MSc. from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Erwan, co-founder of Wikirating, studied Economy and Business Administration at the European Institute for Higher Business Studies Strasbourg, France, and at the Dresden University of Technology, Germany. Both have been working for about 10 years in the IT and financial industry. In February 2012 Erwan left Wikirating by mutual consent.
