[Foundation-l] Proposal: Add Community Generated Information to Publicly Traded Company Pages

[Chris Harris]

Hello, my name is Chris Harris, and I am an employee of The Motley Fool.
For the past year, we have worked with our community to create
community-generated stock ratings and analysis with the objective of
providing greater breadth of coverage than can be generated by
professional analysts.  We would like to propose to the Wikipedia
community that we include our stock rating data on Wiki pages about
publicly traded companies.

 

Our stock analyzing community, CAPS (http://caps.fool.com), uses the
collaborative intelligence of our users to rate more than 5,000
companies (more than double the size of many proprietary and
subscription-based rating services). Open to the public at
caps.fool.com, CAPS collects and weighs the opinions of individual
members of our community based on a variety of criteria - how long ago
the user voiced their opinion, how accurate their opinions have been in
the past, and by how much they beat (or lost to) the market. Each stock
in our database that meets our minimum threshold of community coverage
is then given a rating based on those factors and the relative
comparison of community sentiment across all rated stocks.  Each stock
is assigned a CAPS Star Rating. 5-Star stocks are the highest rated
stocks and 1-Star stocks are the lowest.  CAPS stock ratings are updated
every 15 minutes during market trading hours based on the latest measure
of community sentiment and a weighted averaging of the influence of each
community member based on their up-to-the-minute track record of
performance.  We have a variety of security measures to prevent attempts
to manipulate our stock ratings.

 

We feel that the community intelligence that is expressed in each CAPS
stock rating would be a great pairing with the community intelligence of
Company Wikis.  Through this integration we believe that the Foolish
community, which is interested in finance and financial education, would
be encouraged to become involved in the financial pages on Wikipedia,
and the Wiki community would gain a continuous feed of up-to-the-minute
relevant financial data to enhance the pages of publicly traded
companies. And not only do CAPS ratings provide a solid measure of
current financial thinking regarding a broader range of stocks than
covered by professional analysts on Wall Street, but they may be
predictive indicators as well.

 

While it is too early to make definitive calls about whether or not Star
Ratings are predictive, we've found that during the first year since the
launch of CAPS, a simulated portfolio that uses the highest rated stocks
has outperformed the market by ~66%, and a portfolio of the lowest rated
stocks has underperformed by ~110%. You can see these results here:
http://g.fool.com/art/ratings/5_AND_1_STAR_Nav.gif

 

In short, we feel like the opportunity to integrate CAPS ratings onto
Company Wikis helps both The Motley Fool and Wikipedia to further their
mission to provide breadth, depth, and quality of information via
community intelligence.

 

We have reviewed with Wikipedia a method for receiving our CAPS stock
ratings feed.  Ultimately, we would propose to implement this by adding
the star rating and a link to "Rate this stock" in the bottom of the
Info box on each page. There are several ways in which this could be
done; I here are two examples:
http://g.fool.com/art/ratings/wikipediaBasic.jpg, and
http://g.fool.com/art/ratings/wikipediaEnhanced.jpg
<http://g.fool.com/art/ratings/wikipediaEnhanced.jpg> .

 

I look forward to any insight you can offer on the strengths or
weaknesses of including ratings in Wikipedia.

Thank you,

Chris