Author – Sam Reads
Everipedia may soon change the rules of the game, as far as the online encyclopaedia space is concerned. They plan to leverage blockchain technology to give a more tangible stake to their writers and editors.Wikipedia dominates the current online encyclopaedia space:
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is the dominant player now. With 60 million users a day, 32 million registered editors, and nearly 140,000 having edited an article in the past 30 days, they truly are the leaders.
Large number of Wikipedia editors edit for free, they are volunteers. This is where the game-changer is coming.
Everipedia plans to decentralize this space by giving greater stake to writers and editors:
Everipedia, Inc. is Los Angeles, California, United States based. Sam Kazemian, Mahbod Moghadam, Theodor Foselius, and Travis Moore founded it in 2014.
Incidentally, Larry Sanger, the CIO of Everipedia, was one of the co-founders of Wikipedia.
Everipedia is already a functioning online encyclopaedia. There are about 3 million users monthly. They claim to have more English-language articles than Wikipedia. The number of registered and active editors are much less compared to Wikipedia.
However, Everipedia is not trying to match their giant competitor. Theodor Foselius, the co-founder and CEO, explains what they plan to do, and how. The thrust is to make every writer and editor a stakeholder in their company
Everipedia will use blockchain to make writers and editors their stakeholders:
Everipedia has a points system, using which they assign “IQ” to their writers and editors. They now plan to move to blockchain, the decentralized global ledger system that has helped creation of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. With blockchain, they will convert these “IQ”s to token based currency. They will allot these currencies to their editors, based on proportion of their “IQ”s. This gives the writer or editor a real financial stake in the company.
When a writer or editor contributes to an article, she earns more tokens.
Everipedia envisages an environment where the writers and editors, being stakeholders in the company already, will be vigilant to prevent any falsified articles or edits.
To prevent falsified edits, Everipedia will also introduce a system where anyone trying to write an article, or edit one, will first have to submit her own token. If the work is of appropriate quality, the editor gets her token back, plus added tokens for the contribution. A false article and edit will mean that the editor loses her token.
This will be a big change from the current scenario. Foselius believes that a tangible financial gain will make the editors greater stakeholders in their system.
Everipedia will further gain from blockchain because of completely decentralized structure:
The technology, through its decentralized framework, will make Everipedia less dependent on their own employees. Since Everipedia will become a peer-to-peer resource, there will not be centralized server, and the site will keep running. Also, with the site distributed to users around the world, censoring will not be possible.
Everipedia is ahead of competing disruptor:
Everipedia plans to move to blockchain in January 2018. While Lunyr is another company with plans for blockchain based online encyclopaedia, Everipedia is well ahead.
