Update from CEO on Everipedia’s new platform (May 2019)

Earlier this year, we announced that our team has been hard at work on a brand new platform for Everipedia.org, with the goal of having it ready by Q2 of 2019. For the past couple of weeks, the platform has been in private beta and we are now happy to announce the private beta is entering the final stage of testing.

On May 21, 2019, 0:00 UTC, we will be migrating the new platform to the EOS mainnet. When this happens, the current site on Everipedia.org will be read-only for the remainder of the private beta testing period. This is being done to give our internal team enough time to detect and fix some of the bugs and provide you with the best user experience.

We know many of you have been patiently waiting for the new platform since our announcement of a new UI earlier this year. We are excited to show you some of the things you will be able to do with the new user interface.

What can you expect in the new relaunch?

Our grand vision for Everipedia 2.0 is to make it easy and useful for everyone. (And by everyone, we mean everyone.)

The blockchain community is quite passionate about blockchain technology, but we believe that to truly reach mass market adoption, the platform needs to be just as easy to use as conventional centralized services widely used today (websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). This doesn’t just apply to Everipedia but the blockchain industry in general. By building a user interface that is objectively superior to centralized alternatives, we believe we can innovate where traditional encyclopedias have been passive for almost two decades and create one of the world’s largest online encyclopedias.

Our UX/tech team has been thinking about ways to encourage more regular Internet consumers to participate and have developed several concepts that integrate the benefits of blockchain technology while maintaining ease of use. We will be launching these features out in phases, starting by rolling out the first core functionality and features.

Here are some previews of what to expect from Everipedia’s new platform (including both initial core functionality and future features). Note that we have a lot of new features, but we also wanted to improve our holistic design and provide something a little more relatable to the masses.

Advanced Real-Time Chat & Activity Feed on all Articles

One of the main issues with traditional encyclopedias are the outdated tools for editors to communicate about articles. Historically, you are required to go to a separate talk page and use native markup languages to write out comments in big text fields — not very easy to understand for non-technical users just wanting to discuss a topic.

That is why the new Everipedia platform will feature both a real-time activity feed and live chat on every article, allowing editors to easily communicate regarding content in articles. The activity feed also tracks edits, votes and other types of activity within the article.

Editor Profiles

Everipedia’s new platform is also in the process of building an ‘editor profile’ section. Similar to a traditional social media profile, this new feature will allow editors to provide other users with insights about who they are and their activity as an editor.

In addition to having a mini-bio section, what’s exciting about the user profile is the fact that there will be a built-in activity log that tracks one’s contributions. This will allow people to better connect with editors, but also allow individuals to analyze their own time spent on the platform.

Intuitive Version History

The new version’s history tool on Everipedia 2.0 allows you to easily scroll between different versions of articles with a simple timeline/slider, giving you a clear overview of all historical changes to an article turning it into a living document. This will make it much easier for users to see how an article looked when it was created and how it has evolved over time.

Advanced Citations

Whether you are a student or a researcher, it is important to give credit to other researchers and acknowledging their ideas and allow your reader to track down the sources you used by citing them accurately in an article.

Everipedia has a philosophy of providing people with tools that make citations readable and easy to include, whether you are a student who wants to learn more about a subject or a scholar who wants to update or add more information to a page.

With our new citations feature, not only will adding citations be more intuitive, but one will be able to distinguish the references based on academic elements. For instance, if someone wanted to cite a book, they could add the ISBN number of the book. If you are citing a research paper, there is a tab that will help you crawl important information; this includes the journal in which the article was published, the date, and other elements found in academic style guides. You will be able to cite files, photos, social media posts and other elements. Expanding the scope of what a reliable citation can and should be.

Advanced Media

Over time, people have been relying more and more on linked videos, images, and social media posts to stay informed on several topics. Journalists, organizations, and celebrities have all understood that information is no longer one-sided. As a knowledge base where its technology is open-sourced and our content is crowdsourced, we understand that too.

The days of relying solely on print resources are over, which is why Everipedia’s new platform is going to incorporate rich media. Each platform will have a media section that aggregates all important and relevant social media posts, images, and videos all in one place. You will be able to integrate things like tweets, photos, videos, gifs, Instagram posts, YouTube videos, Facebook page feeds and many other types of media directly into wiki articles.

Page Templates

Creating your first page can be a little overwhelming at first. Where exactly do you start when you have a blank page?

At Everipedia, we believe you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch. As long as you know the type of page you want to create (a bio for a person, a page about an organization, an article for a place, etc.), you should have a structure presented to you based on previous pages created on Everipedia. This is why we are introducing page templates, to give users an easy framework for creating articles about certain types of content.

Curated Lists

There are literally millions of Everipedia pages full of information. However, it can be difficult to find information around a certain topic.

Curated lists can help resolve this issue. Lists are an ideal way to organize and obtain information about a certain topic, and manually curated lists makes it easier for editors and readers to access the content they want without extensive searching. It works similar to boards on Pinterest and will allow editors to build collection of wikis that they can decide to either make public or keep private.

Enhanced Mobile Interface

Editing of wikis on traditional online encyclopedias almost exclusively happens on desktop. That helps explain why most edits made on sites like Wikipedia are from western countries where most people with Internet access owns a computer. However in most developing countries people with Internet access are using smartphones and not desktop computers or laptops. We believe these smartphone-heavy markets represents one of the largest missed opportunities on the Internet today for sites like Wikipedia, which is why we want to heavily emphasize mobile editing on our new platform. With a responsive design, we believe we can capture these missed market opportunities and provide greater inclusion globally to create the world’s largest knowledge base.

Other features we plan to launch

Editing streaks: Similar to Snapchat streaks but for editing, creating a gamification aspect for editors that encourages daily editing of wiki articles.

Similar to Snapchat streaks but for editing, creating a gamification aspect for editors that encourages daily editing of wiki articles. Personalized news feeds: The ability to follow both editors and articles, creating a personalized feed of the content you are interested in. Encouraging editors to check the homepage every day to get the latest updates.

The ability to follow both editors and articles, creating a personalized feed of the content you are interested in. Encouraging editors to check the homepage every day to get the latest updates. Verified accounts: Verifying notable individuals and organizations gives them the ability to cite themselves when complementing wiki articles with their side of the story.

Verifying notable individuals and organizations gives them the ability to cite themselves when complementing wiki articles with their side of the story. Badges: Editors will be given badges/ranks for consistently curating high quality content on the platform and reaching milestones. This is another gamification aspect that gives users with a positive editing history higher credibility on the platform.

Editors will be given badges/ranks for consistently curating high quality content on the platform and reaching milestones. This is another gamification aspect that gives users with a positive editing history higher credibility on the platform. Wiki Blogs: Editors will be able to write blog posts about different topics with the ability to easily integrate data from wiki articles and interlinking articles in the blog posts.

What’s next for the IQ token?

Aside from how the site will look visually, there will be some technical network-level changes related to the IQ token, as well.

As a reminder, we held our first referendum back in February. The community was in favor of implementing certain changes via the Everipedia 2.0 smart contract. These are the community-based changes:

Extending the voting period from 6 hours to 12 hours: You will be able to submit a vote for a proposed edit within a longer period of time.

You will be able to submit a vote for a proposed edit within a longer period of time. Comments on edits: You will be able to summarize what your edit proposal is, which will allow IQ token holders to make a more informed decision before they vote.

You will be able to summarize what your edit proposal is, which will allow IQ token holders to make a more informed decision before they vote. Removing the concept of BrainPower on the front-end: The BrainPower concept was confusing to some, so the community has voted to auto-generate edit proposals and votes with the IQ tokens themselves (instead of having to manually stake for BrainPower).

*For the full list of technical changes, refer to this post.

In addition to the technical changes, Everipedia is going to continue working on upcoming features, which will be announced/deployed in the future. We have generated a list of ideas, based on both our internal discussions and the feedback we have heard on our social channels.

In the meantime, we will continue to communicate what upcoming features to expect in the near future and, of course, let you know when the platform is live.