We have gotten a lot of positive feedback about the content on our site, but quite a few people expressed interest in seeing more data. A few months later, WikiData was born. We wanted the feature to contribute to the overall effort of providing community members with a cohesive narrative on the companies and industries in which they are interested in investing. This meant that we needed more meaningful data. Revenue and net income have an obvious place in the valuation of companies, but understanding the factors that influence these two omnipresent metrics can be invaluable to investors. For instance, showing that net income has fallen because the price that an airline pays per gallon of fuel has doubled over the last 3 years adds a whole new dimension of value. Providing a mechanism for comparing the fuel costs for multiple airlines adds an another facet by allowing the community to see how industry wide trends can affect individual companies within an industry in different ways. WikiData is still in its infancy, but it is growing rapidly and will eventually cover thousands of companies across more than 100 industries.  Here’s a list of industries that have already been populated with WikiData.

The NCAA tournament was pretty exciting this year…especially for Mike, who picked Kansas to go all the way and won the office pool. The final game was pretty exciting - how about that three pointer by Chalmers to tie it? Mike was curled up on the couch in nervous anxiety as KU trailed by 9 with two minutes to go…then suddenly couldn’t stop yelling “Oh Boy! What a SUPER SWELL shot! I win!” as Kansas poured it on in OT.

Tim enjoyed some satisfaction early on as he watched his alma mater Stanford pound Roger’s Cornell. Poor Roger suffered most from bracket-busters like Davidson, while Parker was somehow vindicated in his LAME strategy of picking only the favorites when all the number one seeds made it to the Final Four for the first time in history. Rog came in last among those who filled out the entire bracket, and so he got last pick of the prizes…we’re still waiting for him to row the 10-K erg piece that he owes. Mike, meanwhile, will be sporting a mean Wikinvest lab coat in the new offices next month.

Can’t wait ’til next year, when the Madness strikes again.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of interest in the Bulls and Bears sections of articles. We originally envisioned the bulls and bears articles developing in ways similar to the neutral articles - one cohesive story woven together in a narrative. Sometimes we found people doing that, but a lot of the time, we saw contributors come in and add a specific bulls or bears reason, and it was often hard to rank the importance of any given reason compared to the others. So we’ve been working on the next iteration of the Bulls/Bears feature which we’re launching next week. There are two big improvements to how it works:

1. You can now create individual Bullish or Bearish reasons for a stock (instead of needing to incorporate them into an article). Of course, like most things on Wikinvest, you can improve an existing reason by editing it. An added bonus: all your editing is done in-line!
2. We want the Wikinvest community to help determine the relative importance of the reasons by voting whether they agree or disagree with the reason.

Check out the new feature by clicking on the Bulls or Bears tab on a company article.