WikiChoice:About
From WikiChoice
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Introduction
The New World and 3 Problems
The world has changed dramatically in the last 60 years, and nothing has progressed faster than industry. Since the end of World War II, consumer-driven industry has become the most powerful and ubiquitous factor shaping human life around the globe. Huge leaps in incomes and standards of living have been realized as a result.
But the news is not all good. As modern industry grew into a global game, it outpaced governments' abilities to effectively regulate its multinational players. And the profit-driven nature of business led to immense competitive forces that pushed costs ever lower. Soon businesses were adopting practices that violate ethical, environmental and health standards, carrying them out in countries unable or unwilling to regulate them. Consumers buying goods in their local stores have, for the most part unknowingly, financed these practices, which have now become a major global problem.
We have identified three specific problems that enable and perpetuate this problematic situation.
1. There is a lack of effective and transparent regulation for global industry.
2. Global industrial practices consistently violate ethical, environmental, and health standards.
3. Consumers sustain these violations through their everyday purchasing decisions.
Our Vision
"There is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this."
As you see above, a great amount of power lies in the hands of the consumer - our purchasing decisions sustain global industry and all its positive and negative consequences. If we won't buy it, they won't make it; and if we buy a lot of it, they'll make more like it. Many people neglect to make more ethical and thoughtful purchasing choices simply because they do not have the requisite information on the effects of those choices. So we began searching for that information.
We quickly realized that much of this information exists, and that it is spread across 1,000 books and 10,000 websites. The average consumer does not want to spend time crawling the web, searching for the ethical practices of each company from which she might want to buy products. Especially not in the age of Twitter updates and 'one-click shopping.' So, though the information is out there, it has not been made accessible for the people who can use it most.
The solution we envision for this problem is WikiChoice.com. The vision of WikiChoice.com is to organize all of that information under one roof, making it as simple, actionable, and widely accessible as technologically possible. In this way it will connect consumers like you and me to the people, places, and circumstances behind the things we buy, and thereby allow us to make decisions that reflect those relationships. This will change our decision-making criteria for making purchases, which will affect our purchasing decisions, and thereby put market pressure on companies to improve their practices.
We believe that people with simple access to information about the positive and negative effects of their choices will make better choices, and that the aggregate of those positive choices will change global industry.
How WikiChoice Works
Crowd-Sourcing a Better World
The goal of WikiChoice.com is to make information on ethical purchase choices immediately accessible to anyone who wants it. The first step, of course, is gathering that information. This would seem on overwhelming hurdle - there millions of different consumer products out there, with their own unique histories. However, when one looks at the power of the Internet, this seems feasible. Wikipedia currently features 2,647,144 unique articles in the English language, and Google indexes tens of billions of websites.
The secret to their staggering figures is User Generated Content. Google does not create all the websites it searches, hundreds of millions of people do; and Wikipedia employees do not write the articles it hosts, its users do. Likewise, WikiChoice.com will rely on the thousands of people already researching this area to provide the content for the billions who need it. This will allow us to offer the widest possible array of information and provide the timeliest updates. It will also give transparency to what have long been opaque questions. The beauty of the worldwide web is that it is worldwide, and for the most part, someone, somewhere has the information you want and access to the web.
Move To The Algo-rithm
The raw user data will be both qualitative written content, and quantitative rankings sourced throughout the site. The quantitative data will be processed algorithmically to create a numerical framework for understanding the impacts of products, companies and industries in terms of three broad categories: Ethics, Environment, and Health. This quantitative ranking system will allow the site to quickly call up the most trusted search and browse results. (Should we include something about sub-categories? Not sure how to phrase it, but I like the idea of sub-categories.)
Like Boycotting, Only Positive
Most of the information that relates to business ethics is negative - Company X pollutes the water, Product Z is made in a sweatshop. This is important information, but hard for consumers to act upon, because it only tells them what not to buy. We will take a positive approach, guiding consumers immediately to positive choices. Drawing upon the data above, WikiChoice.com will deliver search-based and browsable data, tailored for the quick-decisions that the modern world requires.
Imagine that you need a new toothbrush, and you want to make sure that your toothbrush purchase does not support irresponsible practices. On the front page of WikiChoice.com you search for "toothbrush," and up pops the 5 most responsibly produced toothbrushes, and the stores nearest you in which they are sold. Same with any other product. Or let's say you have an entire shopping list. Simply copy it into a field on WikiChoice.com and returned to you is a shopping itinerary, showing you which stores near you should visit to get all the most ethical items on your list.
This positive approach will allow consumers to make immediate positive decisions without doing hours of research, enabling them to make swift changes in habit and lifestyle. This will increase market pressure on companies to improve their practices.
Down The Rabbit Hole
For users that want to dig deeper into the consequences of our consumer economy, the site will feature content on specific products (not just toothbrush but, say, Colgate toothbrushes), companies, and industries. Someone might be happy to buy an ethical product in a Target store, and then become interested in that company's practices as well. She could then search WikiChoice.com for Target and find information on Target's impact in terms of Ethics, Environment, and Health. She could then follow that to content about the big box retail industry. This will allow users with a deep interest in the subject to broaden their knowledge and contribution.
The site, while tailored for quick searches and decisions, will also act as an introduction and portal to the broader, more intricate world of modern industry and its effects on different people and geographies. This will be done through the hosting of in-depth content, and linking to partners who specialize in such things.
Problem Solving
How WikiChoice.com Addresses The Three Problems
In the statement of the 3 Problems above, we followed the problems down to their sustenance at the consumer level, so in their solutions we will start at the consumer level and work up.
3. 'Consumers sustain these violations through their everyday purchasing decisions.' As laid out above, WikiChoice.com is dedicated to providing consumers with positive, ethical purchasing decisions. Users who follow these recommendations will effectively withdraw their financial support from products and companies that violate Ethical, Environmental and Health standards.
2. 'Global industrial practices consistently violate Ethical, Environmental, and Health standards.' As consumers opt for responsibly produced products and effectively withdraw their support from companies that violate important standards, market pressures will guide profit-driven companies to improve their practices in terms of Ethics, Environment, and Health.
1. 'There is a lack of effective and transparent regulation for global industry.' The historical nature of government is geocentric - a single government oversees a single area. The progressive nature of business is global - companies move to the areas of lowest cost and greatest return, which tend not to be the same areas. It becomes clear that geocentric government will struggle to govern global business. Consumers, though, have the final say in what a company produces - if consumers won't buy it, companies won't make it. The directness of that relationship, together with the transparency that crowd sourcing provides, puts consumers in the best position to govern global industry. WikiChoice.com will act as a mechanism through which consumers govern industry, and will provide consumers with information with which they can inform other governing choices such as voting and activism.