GlobalCorpWiki Template Manual
What Profiles are Appropriate
The goal of the GlobalCorpWiki project is to promote the production of shared, publicly-available knowledge regarding multinational enterprises. Therefore companies profiled, while not necessarily global, ought to operate in multiple countries.
General Notes
- If you are going to make major edits to a company’s page or work on the edits over a period of days, please save your work online at least once a day so others who might be working on the same company will not duplicate or overlap your work.
- As for the issue of someone making changes to the page while you are making a series of additions to pages (such as filling in blank sections in a page template), this can be prevented by simply adding the comment "work in progress" in the "Summary" box before saving changes. This flags to other users that you will be making a series of changes and that other users should leave the page alone until it seems obvious from looking at the "recent changes" page that you have gone offline and it is safe to tweak a page without causing an "edit conflict".
- References are extremely important! Include an authoritative citation for EVERY PIECE of information in the article. References should include: Author, Title, Date (or date accessed for web pages), and URL/webpage link information (for online sources). Avoid using Wikipedia or citing references which are themselves not authoritative or poorly sourced. For instructions on inserting citations into the text of an article, information on how to evaluate sources, and SourceWatch referencing guidelines, please see:
- It is important that the information in GlobalCorpWiki profiles (as with all of SourceWatch) contribute to the making of an informed public and thereby a more robust democracy.
- If the company you are profiling is referred to by multiple, similar named (e.g. The Walt Disney Company is also known as Disney or Walt Disney or Walt Disney Company) you can make a redirect page. To do this, create a page for the alternative name (e.g. Disney for The Walt Disney Company), and in the edit field type the following:
#REDIRECT [[main page name]]
e.g. #REDIRECT [[Disney]] for The Walt Disney Company
The Template
Find the text version of the template here: Media:CorpKey_template_nov08.doc
The Tag
{{Show badges| GlobalCorpWiki}} appears at the top of the template. This is the tag for GlobalCorpWiki (GCW) profiles, allowing all profiles constructed for this project to appear in searches simultaneously, bear the GCW badge, and utilize the GCW template. Please leave this in place at the top of each profile.
The Infobox
The [Infobox] appears directly below the tag in the template. The infobox used in the GCW template is the Company Infobox. It allows us to include relevant company details in a visually accessible manner and will appear as a floating box in the top right of the profile page. Fill in the fields with brief responses. Blank fields are fine; they will simply not appear in the infobox. In order to fill out the logo field, you must first upload an image file containing the company logo and then input its destination into the infobox logo field. For instructions on how to do this, please see:
Introductory Paragraph
Include in the introductory paragraph a brief summary of what the company is, where it is located, and any aspects of it that are particularly salient. This paragraph need not be more than a few sentences.
Contact Information
Contact information should include at minimum headquarter address, phone number(s), and website address. Insert information on the line before the <br> symbol, which represents a line break.
Company History
The first section under Company History could be in paragraph or timeline form. Historical Financial Information, the second section, can include any financial information, such as revenue, ownership changes, changes in numbers of employees, etc., that are not the most currently available. Business Strategy…
Political and Public Influence
A summary of the types and relative strength of political pressure and influence exerted by the company.
- Open Secrets is a good resource for lobbying and campaign contribution information related to U.S. politics.
Corporate Accountability Section
Corporate accountability here generally refers to issues related to companies' impacts on society at large. The labor, human rights, environmental, consumer protection and product safety, and anti-trust and tax practices subsections all refer to issues and campaigns raised by actors external to the company. The labor section could include information about the working conditions in their factories, their wage or discrimination practices, or their attitude towards unionization, for example. The subsection entitled Social Responsibility Initiatives refers to attempts to have a more positive impact on society initiated by the companies themselves. For example, does the company require its suppliers to comply with extant wage laws? Has the company developed environmentally-friendly practices?
There should be at the top of this section an introductory paragraph providing basic information about the major corporate accountability issues surrounding the company being profiled. The other paragraphs should contain more specific information about particular practices and campaigns related to the subsections of corporate accountability (are these the most appropriate categories? They can be revised…) Photos, links to further resources, and information about organizations involved in campaigns related to the corporate accountability of the company in question are encouraged.
Some resources for getting started finding information on these issues:
Business Scope
This section can start with a paragraph discussing the lines of business and major products of the company.
If the company has any units or subsidiaries, the introductory paragraph may be followed by a list of these units. To make a list, start each line with an asterisk. For more information, see:
The Customers, Suppliers, Creditors, and Competitors Table can be filled in as follows. The first section, which looks like this:
<tr>
<th>Customers</th>
<th>Suppliers</th>
<th>Creditors</th>
<th>Competitors</th>
</tr>
Supplies the column titles for the table. The following sections, which begin with the letters “td” (instead of “th”, which are the column headings), represent the cells of the table rows. Please fill in the cells, leaving empty cells bank by deleting the fill (e.g. delete Customer 1 but leave the “td” markers in place). If you need to add more rows (i.e. if there are more than four customers, suppliers, creditors and/or competitors), simply cut and paste the last section, leaving the table closure markers (“table” at the beginning and end) in place. For more information on making tables, please see:
Financial Information Section
Fill in the date (at least the year) from which the financial information was gathered.
The ticker symbol, main exchanges, and investor website sections and shareholder table apply only to publicly-traded companies. Ownership information might be appropriate in their places for privately-owned companies (should we change this section to make it more applicable to non-U.S./European-based companies?)
Yahoo! Finance is a good place to start looking for this sort of information, as is Edgar Online.
This information should be followed by a paragraph summarizing the geographic scope of the company and its operations, including, for example, what parts of its operations (offices, manufacturing, sales, consumption, etc.) are based in which countries, what the major regions of sales are, where the company is centrally-based, etc. The table which follows functions like the table for customers, suppliers, and so on, but divides financial and employment information by country. Such region- and country-specific information may best be entered collaboratively, with contributing partners entering information related to the region in which they are working.
Governance
At the beginning of the governance section, provide information about the executives, the board members and their affiliations with other companies or government agencies, the CEO or president and what he and the other executives are paid, and when the company with have its next Annual General Meeting or AGM. Present this data in either paragraph and/or list or table form as appropriate. This information can often be found on company investor websites and on Yahoo! Finance.
Articles and Resources
Include in this section bibliographic entries for books about the company (easily found through Amazon.com or library website searches, links to related SourceWatch articles (links to these articles can be created by putting brackets around the title of the article), references (under “Sources”, these will automatically be entered so long as <references/> is kept under the section title), external resources (links to websites with helpful related information), and external articles (links to or bibliographic entries for related articles to the company page). Please see the following page for SourceWatch referencing guidelines:
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch:References
Categories
At the bottom of the page you can mark the article for categories which apply to the company being profiled. Categories are marked by using double brackets around the phrase Category:X. E.g. [[Category:Media]] For lists of SourceWatch categories, see:
