Coming soon... Capital Market Wiki
Since November 2006, I have been working on a new project ... a free encyclopedia of world capital markets in wiki format. This has been a large undertaking and I expect to open this site to the public in the second half of 2008.
Here is text from the main page of this new project that gives an overview:
A free, collaborative encyclopedia of world capital markets
The Capital Market Wiki Project is a cooperative effort to create a free encyclopedia of world capital markets, of professional quality, based on OSINT and Semantic Wiki methods.
The goal of this project is to provide, with perfectible accuracy, in encyclopedia format, concise relevant technical answers to key questions about financial markets, institutions, operations, and instruments — making such information available without cost or advertising to readers worldwide.
A further goal is to create a worldwide professional network and ethical promotional system that provides real economic benefits to collaborating editors and institutional patrons.
Because there are hundreds of thousands of kinds of securities on hundreds of exchanges, traded in many currencies and legal jurisdictions, and because the global capital market is exceedingly complex, while high-cost commercial sources of information leave large segments of the market uncovered — achieving the goals set for this encyclopedia depends upon a robust system of collaborative editing in a wiki format, open source intelligence tradecraft, and a semantic database.
A semantic wiki based on Capital Market Taxonomy
Organized around the same software as Wikipedia, Capital Market Wiki is designed for the special requirements of a capital market encyclopedia:
- The encyclopedia is set up as a Semantic Wiki around a Capital Market Taxonomy that saves time for editors and readers.
- The project permits Original Research so that editors may build up capital market knowledge in areas that are poorly-documented in other sources.
- A system of Ethical Promotion encourages the contribution of authoritative articles that will help develop and strengthen capital market niches in all corners of the world.
- The use of English as a Bridging Language is designed to facilitate the transfer of capital market knowledge between market participants with different language backgrounds, thereby supporting international capital flows.
- Integrated advanced editing tools, such as the spreadsheet WikiCalc, the graphics program AnyWikiDraw, the math formatter MimeTeX, and many parser functions, special tags, and custom editing buttons, backed by a comprehensive help system.
This wiki uses semantic wiki extensions of MediaWiki software and adopts many of the policies, guidelines, syntax, and methods for collaborative editing of Wikipedia.
Status of project ... Mid-2008
After a year and a half of work, the project had passed the following milestones:
- Capital Market Taxonomy completed, with over one thousand classifications of market, instruments, institutions, and operations, with definitions and software.
- Over 3,000 articles stubbed out.
- Software for a collaborative job opportunity network completed and integrated into the wiki.
- Extensions for financial spreadsheets, charting, math, timelines, event calendars, and drawing software added to the basic wiki system.
- Systems for automatically updated semantic tables, editable by anyone, with many features, fully integrated into the wiki system.
- Systems for multi-lingual, collaborative editing, based on Capital Market Taxonomy and individual specialization, built into the system.
- Methods for anonymous editing, reputation building, ethical institutional promotion, and private sandboxes established and integrated into the wiki.
The project is now in the final stages or organization, prior to public release as "proof of concept" of a free, collaborative wiki of world capital markets.