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Exclusive: Why is Everipedia Built on EOS, not on Ethereum?

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia and one of the top 5 websites worldwide in terms of web traffic. While Wikipedia has been dominant in decades, the ecosystem of the encyclopedia is likely to be changed with the advent of blockchain. Everipedia is a wiki-based online encyclopedia which adopts EOS blockchain technology. Besides, a cryptocurrency token called “IQ” is used to encourage the content generation and censorship resistance in Everipedia.

Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger is happy to embrace the changes in the online encyclopedia with blockchain. Joined Everipedia as Chief Information Officer (CIO) Dec 2017, Larry shares to our readers why Everipedia is built on EOS instead of Ethereum! He also mentioned 4 advantages of blockchain on the encyclopedia, yet efficiencies are not the main advantage!

According to Wikipedia, Everipedia is a wiki-based online encyclopedia launched in Jan 2015 as a fork of Wikipedia. As the chief information officer of Everipedia, is this role even more challenging than your co-founder role of Wikipedia?

I’m not sure about the date. The first bits of code were done in late 2014, I’m told. I saw the first version of the site in the spring or summer of 2015, and it had recently come online then. By the way, I’m not a co-founder of Everipedia. I was an informal adviser starting in 2015. I became CIO officially in December of 2017, as a direct result of Everipedia’s move to the blockchain.

No, Wikipedia was harder. With Wikipedia, I was the only person doing daily management of the site, and we had one assigned programmer. So almost everything was on me. When I joined Everipedia, there were already over a dozen full-timers and we’ve doubled that number by now. It’s a very different ball game this time around. The Internet startup scene has changed a lot.

Why Everipedia chose to launch on the EOS blockchain instead of Ethereum? Will Everipedia be launched on other blockchain platforms in future?

There are several reasons to build on EOS. We thought EOS was especially well-built for utility tokens used in content production projects, like ours. Say what you will about it, but the EOS TPS is very high–that’s what we’ll need for frequent edits on an actively-edited wiki. As EOS has a proof-of-stake system, we incorporate staking in our current system as a quality check. The current Everipedia system is based roughly on another project by Dan Larimer, STEEM.

Yes, we have considered launching on other blockchain platforms, but then we’ve always said that—if EOS turns out to have been the wrong platform, we can make changes.

As an encyclopedia, what are the efficiencies that blockchain can bring to Everipedia as compared to Wikipedia?

Sure blockchain is efficient in lots of ways—theoretically, the more decentralized a system is, the less friction there is, so there are fewer people-based inefficiencies. But I don’t think the main advantages of the Everipedia Network are its efficiencies per se.

As we’ve said many times, there are several big advantages to being on the blockchain:

(1) It incentivizes the socially positive work of writing encyclopedia articles. People who wouldn’t work for free on Wikipedia might consider working on Everipedia.

(2) While this applies only to proof-of-stake blockchains, we have a basic layer of democratic oversight in that users must stake something of value (50 IQ most recently) which they could lose if other IQ token holders downvote their contributions. But this doesn’t slow down the editing system; it happens after the edits go live on the wiki.

(3) By being on the blockchain, we become a natural locus of not just an encyclopedia but of an encyclopedia network, what I like to call “the encyclopedia layer of the Internet.” Why should you have to contribute to Wikipedia if you want to contribute to the biggest encyclopedia in the world? All of the world’s articles should be tracked, if not managed through, the Everipedia Network.

(4) Similarly, being on the blockchain will make it easier to persuade people to rate competing articles, when we develop that system. An encyclopedia article rating system is a potentially very powerful, consequential thing, and rating encyclopedia articles takes a lot of work, so people will have to be persuaded that the project is not in the hands of any one organization. It needs to be governed by a neutral, impersonal, technical protocol. So that’s what we’re building.

Exclusive: Will Everipedia Replace Wikipedia in the Future?

Following Part 1 of our interview, Larry took a deeper dive into Everipedia in terms of governance model, staking mechanism, and public awareness. He also addressed the question that has drawn the widespread curiosity of the public: Will Everipedia replace Wikipedia in the future?

For the governance module of Everipedia, the only viable alternative for updating the module software would be for a trusted party (such as core developers or a foundation) to process off-chain consensus and deploy new updates with their elevated permissions. How this approach eases centralization concerns and prevents malicious intent of core developers?

We’ve discussed this quite a bit. It’s not an issue yet but we need to start working on this. We’ve seriously considered putting blockchain governance in the hands of a fully independent nonprofit. But that would be centralized as well if that body had very much authority. The real answer in my personal opinion is to keep the requirements of getting an article on chain kept very low indeed. When we start incorporating articles from many different publishers, the rules have to be extremely broad and open. For one thing, almost no editorial standards should be blockchain-based. The selection of articles to put in an Everipedia Network-based app will have to be up to the app’s owners.

Are there any measures taken by Everipedia to prevent “Garbage in, Garbage out” recorded on the Everipedia blockchain?

There are two important considerations here. One is that the Everipedia Network will—already does—have a staking mechanism that prevents people from putting garbage data (such as literal random characters, plain copyvios, and other basic failures to upload a legit encyclopedia article). The other is that we will want to be able to support articles from a wide variety of points of view. If we impose anything like stringent standards, the managers of those standards will essentially constitute a central editorial body, even if it’s democratic. This will drive off anyone who disagrees with the standards.

When we start using a “one user, one vote” authentication system, this will make lots of new things possible—stay tuned there.

According to Alexa ranking, Wikipedia ranked 5th globally whereas Everipedia ranked 26707th. It seems that people do not care much whether the encyclopedia is based on blockchain. How would you raise the awareness and adoption of Everipedia?

We haven’t been driving people to develop broad categories of content on the wiki for over a year now, because we’ve been transitioning to the blockchain and developing a complete rewrite of our front-end software.

Just wait—you’ll see, this July, when we’ll be driving boatloads of new traffic to develop articles on the site. After the soon-to-arrive relaunch, the site is going to be extremely easy to use, as easy to edit as Medium and a lot easier to edit, and interact with, than Wikipedia.

Ever tried to edit a Wikipedia article only to get frustrated with the community or the clunky software? Well, you can edit those articles to your heart’s content on Everipedia, and we’ll soon be keeping our copies up-to-the-second current with Wikipedia’s, of course without overwriting your changes. It will be the place to go to view basically the best version of Wikipedia, plus another million articles (in English, and a growing number in other languages as well).

We have some other long-term ideas for getting lots of people on board (and we have the runway to develop them), but I won’t bore you with them now.

How do you view the future of Wikipedia and Everipedia? Will they co-exist or combine as one single encyclopedia platform? Is it possible that Wikipedia will be replaced by Everipedia if blockchain gains mass adoption in the future?

There is an active and very committed core of Wikipedians. They won’t be going away, I’m sure. Everipedia is for the rest of us. The Everipedia Network, as the encyclopedia layer of the Internet, will bring all of this encyclopedic content together and give humanity the means to credibly vote on which is the best article (or the best version of the best article) about each topic.

US Election Results to be Published on the Blockchain

Everipedia, the blockchain-based encyclopedia has teamed up with international newsgroup The Associated Press (AP) for the publication and distribution of results for the upcoming US election in November.

The Associated Press has been in charge of counting votes and declaring election victories, and every vote for every US election in history has been overseen by The AP.

Now, the news organization is utilizing the EOS blockchain-based encyclopedia – Everipedia, to count votes and publish election results on the blockchain, with the use of Chainlink oracles to increase transparency in the voting system.

Voting data will be cryptographically signed and published onto the blockchain, using Everipedia’s Chainlink data oracles to bring data on and off the blockchain to communicate securely between different parties in a trustless manner.

The move to bring the voting system onto the blockchain seems long overdue, as many believe that the voting system is in desperate need of an overhaul. By implementing blockchain technology into the election process, voters can have confidence that their data is immutable and secure.

The AP has dabbled with blockchain in the past, collaborating briefly with blockchain journalism group Civil, before the company ceased trading and the partnership was cut short.

Dwayne Desaulniers, The AP’s Director of Enterprise stated that the use of Everipedia provides a crucial additional layer of verification in the voting process, while also optimizing the distribution of results data from approximately 7000 races at the beginning of November.

This is a huge step for the blockchain industry and could be one of the most effective ways of normalizing blockchain across the entire nation if the initiative is a success.