Everipedia

Everipedia was founded in December 2014 and began as a small project of Sam Kazemian and Theodor Forselius in Kazemian's college dormitory room at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).[5][8] The encyclopedia launched in January 2015.[9][10] 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][8]

In October 2015, George Beall and Christian Deciga were introduced to the founders of Everipedia at a conference at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.[3] After selling his technology start-up Touch Tiles in January 2016, Beall joined the group of co-founders.[3] In December 2017, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, became the chief information officer of Everipedia,[11][12] but he resigned in October 2019.

Everipedia is owned and operated by the privately held Everipedia, Inc.[13][14] The site's name is a portmanteau of the words "everything" and "encyclopedia".[15] The company is headquartered in Westwood, Los Angeles, California near UCLA.[5] The site depicts itself as "the encyclopedia of everything" and formerly as "everyone's encyclopedia".[10][16] In January 2017, they had eight full-time workers including two developers.[17] As of February 2018, Everipedia has 15 full-time workers.[18]

The company has raised capital and received funding from angel investors. In July 2015, the company got its first seed funding from Mucker Capital[5] and has raised close to $130,000 on Wefunder.[19] As of January 2017, they raised $700,000 from angel investors.[17] It was announced on February 8, 2018, that the company raised $30 million in funding headed by Galaxy Digital's EOS.io Ecosystem Fund.[20]

In 2016, the site generated most of its income from advertisements.[5] Also in 2017, there was a message at the bottom of every article stating, "Advertise" that directed to information for potential sponsors.[7] The company aims to generate income through ways apart from donations or banners.[21]

On December 6, 2017, the company announced plans to move to generating edits and storing information using the EOS blockchain.[22] Everipedia also stated they were building a peer-to-peer wiki network that adds an incentive system by using cryptocurrency technology to incentivize editors with tokens that have legitimate monetary value.[23] After the blockchain is implemented, the company plans to convert the points into a token currency.[24] 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.[24] If their contribution is accepted, the user gets back the token, which will have obtained value in proportion to the content added.[24] If the edit is not accepted, the user does not get their token back.[25]

IQ Tokens were planned to be airdropped to the EOS list in February, with a network launch planned for June according to Forselius.[26]

Everipedia launched on the EOS blockchain on August 9, 2018.[27][28] Everipedia says the blockchain model does not have centralized servers, therefore eliminating the cost of servers.[29] As Everipedia is decentralized via blockchain, Forselius claims that it is not possible for governments to censor Everipedia by its assigned server IP addresses.[30][31][32]

As of October 2017, the majority of pages on Everipedia were copies of Wikipedia articles.[7] Everipedia reportedly utilized a live Internet bot to monitor Wikipedia for changes, synchronizing such changes but giving preference to local edits on Everipedia.[25] However, as of October 2017, articles were reportedly not updated as regularly as Wikipedia,[7] and as of May 2019, most or all Everipedia articles originating as Wikipedia articles, including those never edited on Everipedia, had not had updated Wikipedia content applied since 2016. Everipedia allows for a larger range of articles than Wikipedia, as the English Wikipedia's notability guidelines are stricter than Everipedia's.[23] Everipedia does not allow censorship on any topic for sourced articles.[33]

In March 2016, Everipedia had 200,000 published pages.[3] Everipedia is ranked 29,017 globally (and 8,730 in the United States) for web traffic according to Alexa Internet, as of 18 January 2019.[2] There are communities in Brazil, China, Germany, and India.[17] The company said in 2017 that Everipedia has 17,000 registered editors and 2,000 active editors as well as 3 million monthly users.[25] In 2019, Kazemian said there were 7,000 active editors.[34]

Several dozen vandals have been banned from Everipedia.[6] In a 2017 interview with Boing Boing, Kazemian claimed that the Everipedia community normally identifies a vandal in 5 minutes.[6] The company has a group of editors who review the activity on the site and delete content that they consider suspicious.[3]

The site frequently focuses on trending topics,[33] 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.[7] The site has been criticized for initially presenting false information in wiki pages on breaking news topics.[7] The incidents were identifying the wrong people in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting[35] and the United Express Flight 3411 incident.[16] 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.[36]

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".[7]

• List of online encyclopedias

• Everipedia.org