ValueWiki Blog

Zach and I have both been pretty swamped in our respective non-ValueWiki lives. As you may have noticed, I am no longer blogging 15 times per week. Due to my schedule, I plan to now use the ValueWiki blog as more of a traditional company blog, only posting relevant updates and announcements.

As ValueWiki approaches its one year anniversary, we are pleased to see the site passing 500 registered users and approaching 5 million page views, with great new investment information being posted every week. Zach is planning a few technical improvements for the site that we hope to unveil in the near future. We will blog as soon as there are new developments to report. Stay tuned!

On Monday ValueWiki took the plunge and blocked all anonymous IP’s from editing. ValueWiki is now forcing all users to register. We will closely monitor and report the effects this has on the wiki.

Banning Anonymous IP’s - The Perennial Debate

Banning anonymous IP’s is a perennial proposal on Wikipedia, hotly debated for years. There is ample statistical evidence to show anonymous IP’s cause most (but not all) forms of vandalism. However, the radical egalitarian spirit of Wikipedia prides itself on keeping the encyclopedia open to everyone.

Wikipedia’s Policy

I would argue that logging in allows a greater level of anonymity than displaying an IP address. And I would also argue that with hundreds of thousands of users and worldwide brand recognition, Wikipedia no longer has to be concerned about luring in new users through experimental anonymous editing. But I greatly respect the spirit of the policy. It is Wikipedia’s open-source idealism that has captured the world’s imagination and attracted so many loyal devotees from around the globe.

ValueWiki’s Policy

Unlike Wikipedia, ValueWiki has the luxury of not being a democracy! In these early stages, we prefer to think of ourselves as a benevolent dictatorship. 99% of ValueWiki vandalism is clearly the result of anonymous IPs. So rather than spend years on community discussion and spam-reverting, we are simply forcing users to register and log in.

For anyone shocked at our decision to close an open-source system, here is our reasoning…

9 Reasons To Force Wiki Editors to Register

  1. Registering is inherently anonymous. In fact, it is far more anonymous than leaving an IP address.

  2. Registering helps promote community.

  3. Registering on a wiki is a one-step process that takes ten seconds.

  4. Registering stymies spam bots.

  5. Registering makes it far easier to ban abusive users. Blocking IP addresses is sloppy work; banning one IP can block an entire country.

  6. Registering allows a wiki to keep clear statistics on users and usage.

  7. Registering nulls most vandalism and spam (99% of ValueWiki vandals are anonymous IP’s).

  8. Registering is required on all other internet message boards and community sites. So registration isn’t considered a huge imposition…

  9. It’s just an experiment. If we don’t like the results, we can always undo it.

I know this is small potatoes to a lot of sites, but it is statistically higher than most Web 2.0 Financial sites. We hit 1 million page views on February 21, so it is nice to feel like we are making progress.

Oh, by the way, Zach finished adding the Singapore and Hong Kong Stock Exchange pages this weekend. So ValueWiki now covers ten worldwide exchanges.

Last night, Zach built an internal edit counter for ValueWiki. Now any wiki editor with editcountitis can quickly see where they stand.

ValueWiki had previously been relying on Interiot’s nifty edit count tool, but this required manual updates. Wikipedia also relies on database dumps and manual uploads, which is a bit labor intensive. Zach’s solution is automated and requires zero effort.

User Contributions

Zach also coded user contributions to display each user’s total edit count.

Is this Relevant?

Obviously the importance or relevance of edit count is deeply debatable. But the fact is, people are going to check their edit count regardless. And it certainly helps us evaluate our user statistics.

Edit Count and Authority

All message boards, from Digital Point Forums to Hot Stock Market, rank users’ authority by number of posts. This gives a general estimate of a user’s knowledge and credibility. For instance, it is hard to imagine a Wikipedian with an edit count of 5,000 who doesn’t know something about Wikipedia.

Similarly, discovering that a user has an edit count of 3 may cause you to tread lightly. It is helpful to know who the newbies are, too. Thanks for building this tool, Zach!

The NYSE-Euronext merger was completed today, with the combined $14 Billion company trading for 13 consecutive hours on trans-Atlantic exchanges.

Euronext is a conglomerate of European stock markets including Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, and the London derivatives market LIFFE. NYSE Euronext is already expanding into Asia, with a partnership in the Tokyo Stock Exchange (privately held until 2009) and an ownership stake in India’s National Stock Market.

ValueWiki remains bullish on global financial consolidation. As in the European Union, economic unity promotes peace between nations. ValueWiki will be working hard in the coming months to cover even more worldwide exchanges.

Last week, following a conversation with one of the good folks at Snap.com, Zach added Snap Previews to all external links on ValueWiki.

Snap Previews are the sneak-peeks you get on this wordpress blog when you mouse-over a link. However, unlike WordPress, the ValueWiki Snap previews are less obtrusive. The preview will only generate if you mouse over the Snap icon.

Zach and I love this feature, as it lets you view a site before deciding to navigate. Honestly, it keeps people on ValueWiki longer. I may submit this as a technical proposal for Wikipedia, since it took Zach about two minutes to build and is fairly useful. Is there any chance Wikipedians will go for it?

Update: I added this proposal to Wikipedia, here. Feel free to add your two cents.

The Sudarshan Chakra Blog has good analysis of Merrill Lynch’s new walled garden. Reuters reports that Merrill Lynch is tired of having its analyst reports borrowed by online sources and is taking aggressive steps to protect its research.

According to Merrill Lynch’s global research chief, Candace Browning, research opinions provided to Merrill Lynch clients often appear verbatim in online news outlets within 60 seconds. Browning writes in a letter to clients, “…Much like the music and film industries before us, Merrill Lynch Research is in the throes of being Napsterized…” (Obituaries for Sellside Research are Premature).

Like the Recording Industry, Merrill Lynch has already made good on its promise to protect its research, successfully sueing Theflyonthewall.com last year for plagiarizing research.

What This Means For Investors

The Sudarshan Chakra Blog sums it up well…

Sell side analysts are currently barred from having privileged access to executives and information. So there is no information that is available to Merrill analysts that is not available to other analysts and the general public. So the only “value added” part of a Merrill report is pretty much the analysts’ opinion and interpretation of data.

It’s a valid point: with so many great online analysts freely available, from KirkReport to Trader Mike, who needs paid Merrill Lynch research reports?

The Future of Free Research

Zach and I built ValueWiki on the assumption that the internet will give paid research a run for its money. Like Wikipedia versus Brittainica, I believe 10 amateur volunteers working in synergy are smarter and more productive than a single paid expert. Examples:

*The ValueWiki SSRX page was written the day the company IPO’d. ValueWiki had SSRX information up weeks before any other financial site.

*Extensive ValueWiki articles like AAPL and RIMM rival the quality of content of Standard and Poors or Value Line (in my opinion).

*ValueWiki got the scoop on fraudulent companies IDWD, SLJB, and CSHD. These companies are too small to receive coverage from paid analysts, so they can easily prey upon uninformed investors.

*Anyone currently Googling for American Wagering (BETM) will find ValueWiki’s new BETM page the most comprehensive free BETM research on the internet.

Only time will tell if ValueWiki truly becomes the Wikipedia of investing. But I believe news like Merrill Lynch’s signal the death knell of paid sell-side research, and the emergence of freely available and high quality internet research.

Shameless Plug

If you believe investors should have completely free access to great research, login to ValueWiki. What have you got to lose, it’s free! Share your research and expertise with the world.

What are the odds of having Politics 2.0 Digged and Interview With PayPerPost VC Dan Rua Slashdotted, all on the same day? Zach and I are pretty amazed to see this blog ranked #1 out of the 811,705 blogs on WordPress. Very surreal.

For new visitors to the blog, here is the scoop on why you should (or should not) read our humble blog…

What ValueWiki Is

Zach and I are the entrepreneurs behind ValueWiki.com, the investment wiki. We’re building a new way for investors to share information. We currently cover ten world exchanges, 65,000 securities, and offer chat, message boards and user voting.

What this Blog Is

Ostensibly, this blog is where we announce news and updates about our startup, ValueWiki. But I do post a lot about Wiki, Web 2.0, the stock market, and plenty of useless information about Jon and Zach and startup gossip.

Top Posts

Top Posts is a quick way to get acquainted with our blog. These are posts that either saw lots of traffic, or required ridiculous ammounts of time and research.

Most importantly, if you’re new here, please spare a minute to check out our startup, ValueWiki. It sort of mystifies us when the blog gets more traffic than ValueWiki… Log in for free on ValueWiki, or leave a comment on this blog giving your feedback on the site. And thank you for checking us out.

I never thought I would title a blog post like that, but this is probably the most important ValueWiki news all month.

With February’s increased traffic you may have noticed ValueWiki hitting a lot of server errors as well as some all-out-crashes. This is pretty terrifying for us, although Zach does seem to have the ability to restart the master server from his cell phone; a fact that mystifies me.

To date, ValueWiki has been self-funded, including February’s $2500 Contributor of the Day Contest, plus the new master server which didn’t exactly grow on a tree. However, depending on how things go with the new server setup, we may be able to remain self-funded for the immediate future. Being able to keep ValueWiki up and running is great news for us.

Zach and I love poking through our Google Analytics. We can see which domains are checking us out, and for how long.

In particular, we’re interested in where ValueWiki’s visitors come from. As we have recently added Canada, Australia, and now London stocks, it’s nice to see our audience reach reflecting that.

ValueWiki has recently imported Singapore and Hong Kong, but these exchanges are not yet fully live on the site. Still, it is neat to see visitors discovering those pages.

Here’s a map of our worldwide visitors. Google lets you zoom in on the exact number of visitors from each town. If you don’t have Google Analytics, try it out. It’s free.