The Transom

This letter was received by IndyBay in October of 2007, and claims that Suterra LLC has intellectual property rights over the chemicals in their pesticide, and orders that they cease publication of these ingredients. The letter claims that an EPA employee illegally leaked the ingredients to The Santa Cruz Sentinal, and they were republished on IndyBay.org. These ingredients are now published on the EPA's website:
http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/biopesticides/ingredients/product/prod_lep_pheromones.htm#129019
http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/biopesticides/ingredients/product/prod_lep_pheromones.htm#128980
Letter republished on IndyBay:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2007/10/12/doc101207.pdf

This news clip is from the Santa Cruz Sentinel lists the ingredients of its product "Checkmate OLR-F" (Z)-11-Tetradecenyl acetate and (E)-11-Tetradecen-1-ol, acetate(E) that the company did not want published, citing a trademark on their contents.


Republished on Indybay:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2007/10/11/checkmate_ingredients2.jpg

This Textron marketing video, explaining the way a cluster bomb works, was originally on Textron's web page as referenced by the below links but has since been moved. A truncated version of the file still exists on multiple video sharing sites, such as YouTube.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/09/323648.html?c=on
http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbforums/archive/index.php/t-6163.html
http://hsrl.proboards39.com/index.cgi?board=f4&action=display&thread=1144284888
http://www.f-16.net/f-16_forum_viewtopic-t-3261.html

This file was obtained on February 25th, 2008 from Cryptome, and is the Gag order that Juliuis Baer Group issued to the website.

Sources within company profiles are often a PDF, Word Document or other multimedia files. Crocodyl has just added a file handling extension to be able to illustrate the type of file, before you download it. For example, Ibiblio has a copy of the US Congressional Record from 2007, and you can see that it is a PDF file before you choose to click on it.

Attached is a zip folder with reports on China's Economy and retail sector. Here are China's Top 100 Companies, according to an August 2007 CNN report:

1. China Petroleum and Chemical
   
2. Petro China
   
3. China Mobile
   
4. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
   
5. Bank of China
   
6. China Construction Bank
   
7. China Life Insurance
   
8. China Telecom
   
9. Baoshan Iron and Steel
   
10. China Communications Construction
    
11. Lenovo Group
    
12. China United Telecommunications
    
13. CNOOC
    
14. China Netcom Group
    
15. Ping An Insurance
    
16. Foxconn International Holdings
    
17. Minmetals Development
    
18. PICC Property and Casualty
    
19. China Resources
    
20. China Shenhua Energy
    
21. Aluminum Corp. of China
    
22. TPV Technology
    
23. Angang New Steel
    
24. Bank of China Hong Kong Holdings
    
25. China COSCO Holdings
    
26. Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical
    
27. Dongfeng Motor Group
    
28. CITIC Pacific
    
29. China Southern Airlines
    
30. Air China
    
31. TCL
    
32. Huaneng Power International
    
33. Bank of Communications
    
34. Shanghai Electric Group
    
35. Wuhan Iron and Steel Processing
    
36. Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel
    
37. China Merchants Bank
    
38. China Eastern Airlines
    
39. Maanshan Iron and Steel
    
40. China International Marine Containers Group
    
41. Hunan Valin Steel Tube and Wire
    
42. Sinotrans
    
43. Shanghai Automotive
    
44. China Shipping Container Lines
    
45. China Coal Energy
    
46. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank
    
47. TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings
    
48. Harbin Power Equipment
    
49. China Minsheng Banking
    
50. Yunnan Copper
    
51. Tangshan Iron and Steel
    
52. Shanghai Material Trading Center
    
53. Jinan Iron and Steel
    
54. COFCO International
    
55. Chongqing Changan Automobile
    
56. Jiangxi Copper
    
57. Suning Appliance Chain Store Group
    
58. Datang International Power generation
    
59. GOME Electrical Appliances Holding
    
60. Bengang Steel Plates
    
61. Laiwu Steel
    
62. Digital China Holdings
    
63. Gree Electrical Appliances
    
64. ZTE
    
65. Handan Iron and Steel
    
66. Beijing Shougang
    
67. Sinofert Holdings
    
68. Shanghai Construction
    
69. Xiamen C and D
    
70. Shanghai Friendship Group
    
71. Guangdong Midea Electric Appliances
    
72. Great Wall Technology
    
73. Weiqiao Textile
    
74. Qingdao Haier
    
75. Eastern Communications
    
76. Beiqi Foton Motor
    
77. Sichuan Changhong Electric
    
78. Anhui Tongdu Copper Stock
    
79. Inner Mongolian Baotou Steel Union
    
80. Huaxia Bank
    
81. China Vanke
    
82. Hunan Nonferrous Metals
    
83. AviChina Industry and Technology
    
84. Sinopec Kantons Holdings
    
85. Sinopec Yizheng Chemical Fibre
    
86. Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery
    
87. An Yang Iron and Steel
    
88. Lianhua Supermarket Holdings
    
89. Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group
    
90. China Mengniu Dairy
    
91. Daqin Railway
    
92. Panzhihua New Steel and Vanadium
    
93. Nanjing Iron and Steel
    
94. Sinochem International
    
95. Anhui Conch Cement
    
96. Henan Shuanghui Investment and Development
    
97. Huadian Power International
    
98. Shijiazhuang Refining and Chemical
    
99. Xiamen International Trade Group
    
100. China Aviation Oil
     

Creating backups of sources is crucial to secure information that might be removed from a website you are citing. Uploading a backup to Crocodyl is one way to do this, perhaps displaying an icon as the secondary download link might be an elegant solution.

Often times news stories display at one url on a webpage, then after a few months go into an archive. This changes the url of the news story, and sometimes puts it behind a login or pay wall. This is problematic for a website like Crocodyl, because we routinely use online news stories as sources. If the link is broken then the source is no longer useful in verifying our factual assumption.

One technical fix to this problem is using a Mozilla Firefox extension called, Zotero, which was created by a great media democratization organization called The Center for History and New Media.

Zotero allows users to create a "Snapshot" of a web page, that is more robust than a simple screen capture. The snapshot maintains the linking structure, original files and HTML of the page, along with a time stamp of the when the page was accessed. All of this information is saved in a folder on your hard drive. By clicking "view snapshot" on the saved news story, you can later see the web page exactly as it was at the moment you read the story originally. Alternatively, you can click "Show file" and the location of the folder on your hard drive will be displayed. This is especially useful for web pages that might change as a result of a controversy. Taking a snapshot of the page prevents later changes from discrediting your source.

I am currently working on an elegant solution for displaying Zotero snapshots on crocodyl pages. Ideally, you could upload snapshots of news stories to serve as "clips" then link to them from the body of the company profile text. This way, we could avoid the problem of having links to other web pages change, or at least have a backup source if they did.

I have not seen other websites that integrate this functionality, so it would be a great new feature that would solve a fairly large issue for the online press. Anyone with ideas about an solution, please comment on this post.

Attached is a sample Zotero snapshot, in a zip folder.

One of the questions that keeps coming up when we introduce people to the idea of Crocodyl is, "What do you do when the company tries to edit its own profile?" Our response has always been that we apply our standards of quality to the contributions, not the contributor. We are continually rethinking our strategy on how to offer accurate and timely information on corporations, while maintaining an open, community based framework. One recent development on Wikipedia illustrates a shift in the ecosystem of information online significant to this debate.

Wikipedia recently began altering the structure of articles on companies with a lot of controversy surrounding their activities. Perhaps because many companies police their Wikipedia pages, the site has taken to creating separate pages from the company profile. Royal Dutch Shell has successfully dodged a few pieces of bad PR by having a separate page for controversy, even though the page appears to have been created by a well meaning activist. Even the New York Times has a separate page, labeled "Criticism of The New York Times." This trend is problematic because it severs this important information from the pages that get the most traffic--the main company profile. We might be able to fill a void here by assuring that the "mud sticks" on our company profiles, adding a critical voice to the conversation. I think a critical part of this is trusted individuals and organizations acting as "sponsors" of a set of profiles by subscribing to the page, and checking the quality of new submissions, but I am curious to hear what other people think. Please feel free to add comments in response.

I recently had a conversation with Daniel Souweine, who has been working on a project to better integrate the environmental record of companies into their main Wikipedia profile, and he had some advice about how we could address this issue in Crocodyl. In an email he explained the phenomenon:

"What we have tried to do is avoid the controversy frame, which as you note ends up sluffing the important information to another article. Instead, we have tried to establish sections like "Environmental record" or "Health and safety record". These section headings are basically neutral, but with a company like Shell will end up skewing critical. But it is really hard for anyone to argue that they don't belong in the main article." He added,

"That said, if there is enough controversy, or really enough of any kind of information, it is actually consistent with WP guidelines to split it off. Put another way, it would be unwieldy to have all the stuff that is in controversy put in the main article. In those cases, I think the key is having a really clear summary of controversial issues in the main article. For example, the summary controversy section that is in the main Shell article right now is kind of all over the place and doesn't succinctly lay out the basics about what bad stuff they have done. For a list of all the articles we have worked on environmental issues, check out the task force page."