How to publish a company profile:
Phil Mattera of the Corporate Research Project authored the Crocodyl PDF Company Profile Research Guide. It is an excellent walk-through of how to get a solid understanding of a corporation and it's operations. It contains a step by step tutorial of which online resources yield the best results. If you are daunted by the prospect of profiling an entire company or don't know where to begin, take a look at this first.
General publishing tips for Crocodyl:
This tutorial will walk you through the process of creating a company profile on Crocodyl. The steps for publishing other research on the site are similar to this one. One thing to note before you start is that you don't have to fill out a complete company profile to contribute to Crocodyl. As much or as little information that you enter in is useful to our project.
1. The first thing you want to do is create an account. In the upper right hand corner of the screen is a link that will take you to the account creation page, "Sign in/Create account"
2. Once you fill in your information on the account page, a confirmation email will be sent and you will receive a temporary password. Sometimes this email gets caught by your spam folder, so make sure to check there in your email account. If you want to be credited personally for your work, make your user name your, "Firstname Lastname" with capital letters and a space, just like you would write it normally.
3. To create a new company profile, click the "Create Content" link in the upper-right hand corner and select "Company profile" from the list. Similarly, you can edit any company profile on the site by clicking on the title of the profile and selecting "Edit" from the tabs on the company profile page.
4. Entering information. Many of the fields are "Hidden." If you click on the blue link "Corporate accountability," it will expand into a few narrative text fields with different issue areas. You can add information to these or any of the other fields by clicking on the blue link to expand them. Enter in as much information as you have collected and others will fill out the profile later. You will need to source all information entered, so create links to supporting evidence for all factual assertions.
5. To create links, bold text, italics and bulleted lists, use MediaWiki formatting. For more advanced formatting visit the MediaWiki Cheatsheet. Not all MediaWiki formatting is compatible with Crocodyl, but the basics are:
Italics = ''Italics''
Bold = '''Bold'''
Link with title = [http://www.example.org Name of link]
Plain link = http://www.example.org
Carriage return = <br />
6. Each profile will have "issues" and "industries" to categorize which part of the site the corporation is filed under. Also, you may want to type in some "tags" (keywords) that will help search engines and users find the information. Although the template is comprehensive, the only required field is the title, because this is a collaborative research effort, many people will be contributing to the same profile.
7. The most recently updated company profile will be promoted to the front page, along with an attribution to the person who did the last edit. The rest of the corporate profiles are accessible via the search function, and by browsing the site using the issue or industry categories.
At any time please feel free to get in touch. Email Ian Elwood (
) with any questions or concerns at for a walk-through of the submission process. Also, join our email discussion list to introduce yourself or talk about new research projects that are in the works.
How to track changes on pages:
You can "subscribe" to any page on Crocodyl. What does this mean? If you are interested in being the "sponsor" of a company, and making sure that the information on that company remains critical and accurate, you can track the changes on the company's Crocodyl profile and be notified when there are updates. Most likely these updates will be from other people interested in publishing their research on the company, but the company itself may also be interested in editing this page. This is where our users come in.
We welcome the contributions of anyone--including the corporations we are profiling--but anyone contributing to Crocodyl must adhere to our editorial standards. We publish only critical and accurate information, there are plenty of other venues for advertising and gossip. We only want information on companies that illustrates their role in society at large. What is the company's environmental record? Are they fair to unions and their workers? Does the company regularly break the law?
If you look at the bottom of the company profile, you will see a link that says "Subscribe." Click on that and then select "Subscribe to this post." You can manage all of your subscriptions from the subscriptions tab in the "My account" section, when you are logged in. From there you can select "Digest mode" to be notified once a day about any changes, or you can view all changes as they happen. Checking the "Auto-subscribe" box will set your account to be notified of any changes made to the pages that you edit, so if you change a page you will see all changes after that. Clicking "Categories" allows you to subscribe to an entire section of the site, either issue areas or industries. Clicking "Content types" allows you to subscribe to a particular page type, the most common of which is the "Company profiles." Clicking "Threads" allows you to manage individual page subscriptions. All other preferences can be managed through your "My account" section, which is visible in the upper right hand corner of any page on Crocodyl, when you are logged in.
