Alex’s recent post on philanthropy reminded me of a new project being built by some local stock market geeks I met in Los Angeles. While the merit of the Wisdom of Crowds approach to investing is debatable, open community-based information tools have the potential to improve upon the issues of transparency in investing.

ValueWiki, launched in September 2006, is a collaborative investment research tool where users collaboratively write and share stock information. According to ValueWiki co-founder, Zach Greenberger, “The ValueWiki mission is to provide information that is efficient, accurate, and unbiased. By presenting investment information in a collaborative environment, we level the playing field and help investors make decision on a company’s merits, not artificially generated hype.� ValueWiki aims to be the Wikipedia of investing. They also offer free stock chat, message boards, blogging, groups, and voting.

On February 1st, ValueWiki is launching a Contributors' Contest. They’ll be giving away $100 each weekday to the “best� contributor and $500 to the best of the month. Their goal is to encourage more activity on the site, which they hope will lead to healthier investment principles by their contributors (and the companies they cover).

I encourage those readers with an interest in stocks check it out and share your thoughts on this approach in the comments. Would you trust investment information shared on a wiki? If the ValueWiki community (or another like it) grows large enough, perhaps it could encourage companies to become more transparent?