Mucker portfolio company Everipedia, the “encyclopedia of everything,” announced today that it is creating the world’s first encyclopedia on the blockchain, and that Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger has joined the company’s executive team as Chief Information Officer.
Dr. Sanger joins the company as a key member of an effort to build a new, decentralized encyclopedia network. The Everipedia team sees a day when all the world’s encyclopedic information will be added to the blockchain - establishing a peer-to-peer, decentralized knowledge base, and allowing every editor to become a stakeholder in that network.
Dr. Sanger is a tech industry pioneer with deep experience in online encyclopedias and other knowledge projects. He was responsible for formulating much of Wikipedia’s original policy, and has been a champion of open source since the early days of the consumer internet. He was also founder and editor-in-chief of Citizendium and advised various online encyclopedia projects, such as Ballotpedia, and educational projects such as WatchKnowLearn. Dr. Sanger received his doctorate in philosophy, with a specialization in epistemology, from the Ohio State University.
“Blockchain technology is making exciting new things possible. I’m delighted to join this team which is poised to innovate on the Wikipedia model just as Wikipedia innovated on the Britannica model almost two decades ago. In an era of misinformation, the world stands to benefit enormously from a transparent, immutable, and decentralized protocol for accessing and sharing knowledge,” Sanger said. “We’ll not only make Everipedia more comprehensive than Wikipedia, in my role I’ll help create a neutral framework enabling the world to find the best encyclopedia articles on every topic.”
Crucially, this new peer-to-peer encyclopedia network will add an incentive structure and a distributed backend--essentially, a decentralized, uncensorable database spread among many nodes--hosted within the blockchain. The new system rewards users with tokens for curating articles and allows everyone to become a stakeholder in the network through those tokens, which are pegged to the value of the network. The goal of the ecosystem is to democratize the traditional encyclopedia model and economically align the incentives of the value creators and value extractors. In other words, writers have an incentive to create high-quality articles for the network, and holders of blockchain tokens have an equally strong incentive to keep quality high.
We wish the team all the best as they push forward with this bold and exciting effort.
