Everipedia
Screenshot
Type of site
Blockchain encyclopedia
FoundedDecember 2014 (2014-12)
Headquarters
Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Founder(s)
Key people
IndustryDot-com company
Current statusDefunct
Content license
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Int'l

Everipedia (/ˌɛvərɪˈpiːdiə/) is a defunct blockchain-based online encyclopedia. Everipedia was founded in 2014 and was officially launched in 2015, as a fork of Wikipedia. Larry Sanger (who co-founded Wikipedia) joined the company in 2017.[3] In 2022, Everipedia was inactivated, becoming a static archive[4] and redirecting to a new crypto-only encyclopedia, IQ.Wiki.

The company was initially headquartered in Westwood, Los Angeles but has since relocated to Santa Monica, California.[5] The site depicts itself as "The World's Largest Blockchain & Crypto Encyclopedia" and formerly as "everyone's encyclopedia".[6][7][8][9]

History

Everipedia (2014–2022)

Everipedia, a portmantaeu of "Everyone's Encyclopedia", began in December 2014 as a small project of Sam Kazemian and Theodor Forselius in Kazemian's college dormitory room at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).[10][5][11]

The encyclopedia launched in January 2015[12][6] as a fork of Wikipedia. Travis Moore joined the company as a co-founder in the winter of 2015 and Mahbod Moghadam joined as a co-founder in July 2015.[5][11]

The company raised capital and received funding from angel investors. In July 2015, the company got its first seed funding from Mucker Capital[5] and raised close to $130,000 from 201 investors on Wefunder.[13] In October 2015, George Beall was introduced to Everipedia at a presentation in California State University, San Bernardino.[14] After selling his technology start-up Touch Tiles in January 2016, Beall joined the group of co-founders.[10] In 2016, the site generated most of its revenue from advertisements.[5] The company aims to generate income through ways apart from donations or banners.[15]

In January 2017, they had eight full-time workers including two developers.[16] By February 2018, headcount had increased to 15 full-time workers.[17] As of January 2017, they raised $700,000 from angel investors.[16] It was announced on February 8, 2018, that the company raised $30 million in funding headed by Galaxy Digital's EOS.io Ecosystem Fund.[18] In December 2017, Everipedia announced that co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, had become the chief information officer of Everipedia.[19][20] On October 18, 2019, Sanger announced his resignation from this position.[21]

The majority of Everipedia's articles were copied from Wikipedia and promotional material about cryptocurrency and can still be accessed on the former domain.[22]

Inactivation and archival (2022–present)

Everipedia was converted to a read-only archive in October 2022. Its parent company, IQ, has created a new crypto-only encyclopedia called IQ.Wiki.[23]

Products

IQ Token
IQ token symbol
Denominations
CodeIQ
Development
White paperWhitepaper
Code repositoryEveripediaNetwork
Development statusActive
Developer(s)everipedia.org
Ledger
Supply limit21,000,000,000
Website
Websiteiq.wiki

Blockchain signatures

On December 6, 2017, the company announced plans to move to generating edits and storing information using the EOS blockchain.[24] After the blockchain is implemented, the company plans to convert the points into a token currency.[25] The tokenized system would let every user become a stakeholder in the wiki network. Each editor will put their token into play for each edit.[25] If their contribution is accepted, the user gets back the token, which will have obtained value in proportion to the content added.[25] If the edit is not accepted, the user does not get their token back.[3]

Everipedia launched on the EOS blockchain on August 9, 2018.[26] Everipedia says the blockchain model does not have centralized servers, therefore eliminating the cost of servers.[27] As Everipedia is decentralized via blockchain, Forselius claims that it is not possible for governments to censor Everipedia by its assigned server IP addresses.[28][29][30] On November 3, 2020, the Associated Press began publishing incoming results from that day's 2020 United States presidential election onto the Ethereum and EOS blockchains using the Everipedia OraQle.[31] As of 2022, the company no longer registers signatures on the EOS blockchain and has since been using the Polygon blockchain to generate edits and store information. Polygon allows the signatures to be recorded without any gas fees, unlike other blockchains. The company has plans to support Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain in the future.

Content and users

Everipedia adapted social media elements such as letting celebrities communicate with fans,[32] and allows users to create pages on any topic as long as the content is cited and neutral.[5][33]

In March 2016, Everipedia had 200,000 published pages.[10] As of October 2017, the majority of pages on Everipedia were copies of Wikipedia articles.[34] In 2022, cryptocurrency critic and Wikipedia editor Molly White said that Everipedia "is largely still a graveyard of content they've just scraped off Wikipedia, articles that people have written about themselves, and, increasingly, crypto spam."[35] Everipedia reportedly utilized a live Internet bot to monitor Wikipedia for changes, synchronizing such changes but giving preference to local edits on Everipedia.[3]

Everipedia allows for a larger range of articles than Wikipedia, as the English Wikipedia's notability guidelines are stricter than Everipedia's. Everipedia does not allow censorship on any topic for sourced articles.[36]

There are communities in Brazil, China, Germany, and India.[16] The company said in 2017 that Everipedia has 17,000 registered editors and 2,000 active editors as well as 3 million monthly users.[3] In 2019, Kazemian said there were 7,000 active editors.[37]

Several dozen vandals have been banned from Everipedia.[33] In a 2017 interview with Boing Boing, Kazemian claimed that the Everipedia community normally identifies a vandal in five minutes.[33] The company has a group of editors who review the activity on the site and delete content that they consider suspicious.[10]

The site frequently focuses on trending topics,[36] with the few articles created by users of the site mostly being about sensational topics such as YouTubers, memes, activists, white supremacists, and police shooting victims.[34]

The site has been criticized for initially presenting false information in wiki pages on breaking news topics.[34] The incidents were identifying the wrong people in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting[38] and the United Express Flight 3411 incident.[7] Jeff John Roberts of The Outline raised concerns about the privacy ramifications of Everipedia, which developed many of its articles by gathering content from social media, creating publicly visible entries on non-notable individuals. Roberts also noted that trolls have used Everipedia to promote conspiracy theories and defamatory comments.[39]

Everipedia previously offered a service for a monthly fee that allows for users and businesses to create tailored Everipedia entries that get "full-time monitoring for updates and preventing vandalism".[34]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Wikipedia-grundare ansluter till utmanare startad av svensk 22-åring". digital.di.se (in Swedish). December 14, 2017.
  2. ↑ Caballero, Lucía (April 2, 2018). "De fundar Wikipedia a competir con ella: "Lo podemos hacer mucho mejor"". elDiario.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Rubin, Peter (December 6, 2017). "The Wikipedia Competitor That's Harnessing Blockchain For Epistemological Supremacy". Wired. Archived from the original on December 6, 2017.
  4. ↑ About
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Bowman, Bryan (December 7, 2016). "From UMass to Silicon Valley: An interview with 'Everipedia' founders". Amherst Wire. Archived from the original on December 22, 2017.
  6. 1 2 "Everipedia, everyone's encyclopedia". January 11, 2015. Archived from the original on January 11, 2015. Retrieved October 20, 2018.
  7. 1 2 Pierce, Matt (April 12, 2017). "No, the media did not identify the wrong David Dao as United's passenger". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on September 13, 2017.
  8. ↑ "Company Overview of Everipedia, Inc". Bloomberg L.P. January 7, 2018. Archived from the original on December 15, 2017.
  9. ↑ Kopańko, Karol (February 9, 2018). "Everipedia ma być Wikipedią na blockchainie, której nie można wyłączyć" [Everipedia is to be Wikipedia on Blockchain, which cannot be disabled] (in Polish). Spider's Web. Archived from the original on February 17, 2018.
  10. 1 2 3 4 "The Daily Pennsylvanian - | Wharton dropout creates Wikipedia alternative alongside Rap Genius co-founder". March 25, 2016. Archived from the original on March 25, 2016. Retrieved October 16, 2018.
  11. 1 2 Lindström, Emil (December 16, 2015). "Emil möter: Theodor Forselius" [Emil meets: Theodor Forselius] (in Swedish). Emil Lindström. Archived from the original on January 7, 2018.
  12. ↑ "Novogratz's new fund, others invest $30 million in online encyclopedia - Reuters News - Breaking News". April 26, 2018. Archived from the original on April 26, 2018. Retrieved November 2, 2018.
  13. ↑ Christian, Jon (November 30, 2017). "Who funds the crowdfunders?". The Outline. Archived from the original on December 25, 2017.
  14. ↑ "Everipedia Co-founder Christian Deciga: From McDonald's to a Front Row Seat in 2020's Decentralized Finance (DeFi) renaissance". GlobeNewswire News Room (Press release). October 7, 2020. Retrieved January 11, 2021.
  15. ↑ Wallenberg, Björn (February 26, 2018). "Meet the 22-year-old Swede with world-conquering plans for his crypto-remake of Wikipedia". Business Insider. Archived from the original on August 16, 2018. Retrieved April 29, 2018.
  16. 1 2 3 Malankar, Nikhil (January 12, 2017). "Mahbod Moghadam: Journey From Rap Genius To Everipedia". Tell Me Nothing. Archived from the original on July 4, 2017.
  17. ↑ "Meet the 22-year-old Swede with world-conquering plans for his crypto-remake of Wikipedia". nordic.businessinsider.com. February 26, 2018. Archived from the original on August 16, 2018. Retrieved October 17, 2018.
  18. ↑ "Encyclopedia on blockchain 'Everipedia' raises $30M in new funding". EconoTimes. February 9, 2018. Archived from the original on February 17, 2018.
  19. ↑ Patterson, Dan (December 8, 2017). "Why Wikipedia's cofounder wants to replace the online encyclopedia with the blockchain". TechRepublic. Archived from the original on January 25, 2018.
  20. ↑ Brown, Leah (December 11, 2017). "Why Wikipedia's cofounder wants to replace the online encyclopedia with the blockchain". TechRepublic. Archived from the original on December 12, 2017.
  21. ↑ Sanger, Larry (October 18, 2019). "Introducing the Encyclosphere". larrysanger.org. Archived from the original on November 20, 2020. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  22. ↑ Newton, Casey (February 16, 2022). "Why you can't rebuild Wikipedia with crypto". The Verge. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
  23. ↑ "IQ.wiki Company Profile: Valuation & Investors | PitchBook".
  24. ↑ Andy (December 12, 2017). "Everipedia, l'encyclopédie en ligne basée sur la blockchain" [Everipedia, the online encyclopedia based on the blockchain] (in French). FZN. Archived from the original on December 24, 2017.
  25. 1 2 3 "Un fondateur de Wikipédia passe à la concurrence" [Wikipedia founder goes to competition] (in French). 20 Minutes. December 7, 2017. Archived from the original on December 24, 2017.
  26. ↑ Iandoli, Rafael (December 20, 2017). "O que é Everipedia, a biblioteca 'incensurável' que quer derrubar a Wikipedia" [What is Everipedia, the 'unobjectionable' library that wants to overthrow Wikipedia] (in Portuguese). Nexeo. Archived from the original on February 26, 2018. Retrieved December 12, 2019.
  27. ↑ Perez, David (December 7, 2017). "Everipedia: la alternativa del cofundador de la Wikipedia basada en blockchain" [Everipedia: The alternative of the co-founder of Wikipedia based on blockchain] (in Spanish). Omicrono. Archived from the original on December 24, 2017.
  28. ↑ Wallenbergtorsdag, Björn (December 14, 2017). "Wikipedia-grundare ansluter till utmanare startad av svensk 22-åring" [Wikipedia-founders Connect to challenger started by Swedish 22-year-old] (in Swedish). DiGITAL. Archived from the original on December 15, 2017.
  29. ↑ Müller, Leonardo (December 8, 2017). "Conheça a Everipedia, uma versão da Wikipédia 'movida a blockchain'" [Meet Everipedia, a version of Wikipedia 'moved to blockchain'] (in Portuguese). TecMundo. Archived from the original on December 24, 2017.
  30. ↑ Vodopyanova, Anna (February 8, 2018). "Everipedia closes $30M to build Wikipedia rival on blockchain technology". VatorNews. Archived from the original on February 17, 2018.
  31. ↑ Castillo, Michael del. "How To Track Official Election Results On Ethereum And EOS". Forbes. Retrieved November 4, 2020.
  32. ↑ "How to Disrupt any Industry in 3 Steps". Inc.com. January 9, 2016. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  33. 1 2 3 James, Andrea (June 12, 2017). "Can Everipedia remake collaborative encyclopedias to be inclusive and enjoyable?". Boing Boing. Archived from the original on August 18, 2017.
  34. 1 2 3 4 Christian, Jon (October 4, 2017). "Everipedia is the Wikipedia for being wrong". The Outline. Archived from the original on January 2, 2018.
  35. ↑ Newton, Casey (February 16, 2022). "Why you can't rebuild Wikipedia with crypto". The Verge. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
  36. 1 2 Thi, Anh (August 10, 2017). "Everipedia: Bản sao xấu xí và tội lỗi của Wikipedia" [Everipedia: ugly copy and sin of Wikipedia] (in Vietnamese). VNG Corporation. Archived from the original on February 26, 2018.
  37. ↑ "UCLA alumni create online encyclopedia powered by cryptocurrency". dailybruin.com. Retrieved January 26, 2019.
  38. ↑ Baird, Addy (October 2, 2017). "White House-credentialed media outlet falsely accuses 'far left loon' of Las Vegas shooting". ThinkProgress. Archived from the original on October 26, 2017.
  39. ↑ John Roberts, Jeff (February 8, 2018). "Blockchain Rival to Wikipedia Raises $30 Million, Plans Token 'Airdrop'". Fortune. Archived from the original on February 13, 2018.
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