Everipedia

» see everipedia.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By the time everipedia was worth signing up for, the thing it had originally promised was no longer what it was selling. A wikipedia fork with looser deletion rules is a reasonable idea in 2014. A wikipedia fork that pays you in a token for editing it is a different product wearing the same clothes, and the second one is what got the funding.

Sam Kazemian and Theodor Forselius started it in december 2014 in a dorm room at ucla and put it online the following january. The original complaint was specific and not unreasonable. Wikipedia deletes articles that fail its notability bar, and everipedia would keep them, so anyone at all could have a page. By march 2016 the site claimed more than 200,000 published pages, though an audit in 2017 found that the majority of them had been copied straight out of wikipedia.

Larry Sanger joined in december 2017 as chief information officer. He co-founded wikipedia with Jimmy Wales and had spent the years since starting and leaving alternatives to it, so his name on the masthead was the strongest signal everipedia ever managed to buy. He resigned on 18 october 2019, before the token economy he had been hired to legitimize really got going.

I read about this one and never opened an account. Paying people per edit is the part that stayed with me, because it answers a question that nobody actually editing an encyclopedia was asking. The people who write reference articles for free were never held back by the absence of a payout, and the people who would only write for a payout are not the ones you want writing your reference articles.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

The seed money was small and slightly odd, about $130,000 raised from 201 investors on Wefunder in july 2015, with Mucker Capital alongside. Another $700,000 came from angels in january 2017. Then on 8 february 2018 everipedia announced $30 million led by Galaxy Digital's EOS.io ecosystem fund, which was a serious amount of money for a site whose main technical achievement was a scraper.

The blockchain plan launched on EOS on 9 august 2018. Editors would stake IQ tokens on a proposed change, and if the change was accepted the stake came back with value accrued. It was a governance mechanism dressed as a payroll, and it made the site legible to crypto investors in a way that "wikipedia but we keep the deleted stuff" never had. In 2022 the whole thing moved again, to Polygon, because EOS gas fees had become a problem.

~ the decline ~

The content never recovered from how it started. Assessments in 2022 still described everipedia as largely a graveyard of pages scraped off wikipedia, which is a hard reputation to shake when the scrape is the reason your article count looked impressive in the first place. The pages that were original tended to be about the sort of subject wikipedia had declined to cover, and the reason wikipedia declined was usually that nobody independent had written about it.

Sanger's departure in october 2019 removed the one piece of credibility the project had borrowed rather than built. After that the encyclopedia framing got thinner every year while the token got more attention, until the encyclopedia was the part that had to justify itself.

~ how it actually ended ~

On 11 october 2022 the parent company launched IQ.wiki in beta and put its name where everipedia's had been. The new site was a crypto encyclopedia, deliberately narrow, covering protocols and the people who run them. Everything from the old general encyclopedia stayed reachable as a read-only archive, which is the polite version of switching something off.

Something specific died here, and it was not the company. IQ is still trading and IQ.wiki is still publishing. What ended was the idea that you could fix wikipedia by removing its editorial judgment and replacing it with a market. Eight years in, the answer came back, and the answer was that a market produces exactly as many articles as it is paid to produce and not one of them is the one you needed.

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