Wales’ co-founder at Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, became Everipedia CIO in December 2017. It has legitimate experience and ambition behind it.

While Wikipedia is an established tour de force, a new encyclopedia or resource project, which doesn’t have its own database of articles available in over 300 languages, might benefit from launching on a whole new model. Blockchain could help unlock those resources for Everipedia at a rate much faster than the 15 years it has taken Wikipedia.

Again, Wikipedia is an NPO. It is not interested in the argument put forth by Everipedia in its white paper introduction:

“Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world boasting over 19 billion pageviews a month across all languages. However, Wikipedia unintentionally traps the knowledge capital it generates within its own platform when its content could be used to create a thriving knowledge economy.” (Boldness my own)

Governance would be Completely Different

Participating in Everipedia is conditioned on owning tokens. That isn’t the case with Wikipedia. Not that this disqualifies the premise of Everipedia, but this format does bring up some rather important questions about the edits made by Everipedia editors, who essentially will pay for editing rights, privileging people who have assets over those who don’t. Wikipedia is far more decentralized than Everipedia, just by virtue of a wider audience that can make edits and question elements of articles.

Two theoretical projects I wrote about earlier this year — using blockchain to authenticate translations or unify ancestry records — also have questions of governance and what qualifies someone to certify translations and records. Every project applying blockchain to things besides financial transactions will have to grapple with these sorts of questions.

While the incentivization model is appealing, it might take Everipedia some time — assuming it is successful in the long term — to filter out bias that might come from having such a select group of participating editors. Wikipedia deservedly was treated with skepticism in its early years and undertook a massive amount of work to turn that reputation around nearly 180 degrees.

Wikipedia will likely watch what projects like Everipedia do in the next few months and years, as well as to what extent the blockchain and tokenization business succeeds. If it does and regulation allows non-profits some leniency to utilize cryptocurrency and tokens as a tool, then perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation will experiment as well. Otherwise, they seemingly might not have to.

Should People be Dejected by Wikipedia’s Stance?

Wikipedia is an internet behemoth. It stands for the decentralization and transparency that, ostensibly, a lot of ICO projects back in their founding philosophies. So should this be considered a shot in the arm? A significant blip on the radar?

In my opinion, no. Wikipedia is doing what is good for their organization and standing by its proposition to bring an unbiased, publicly available data resource. Everipedia will test a different model for its project, and we will learn how blockchain can improve encyclopedias and where they actually can’t. As will other projects in the future.