What is Everipedia?
You probably heard of Wikipedia before right? It is an online encyclopedia where you can find pretty much whatever information you are looking for.
Everipedia
As defined in their website:
Everipedia is the next generation encyclopedia rebuilt for the modern age. With over 6 million articles and counting, it's already the world's largest English encyclopedia by content. Everipedia is free from ads and free to use for everyone under creative commons.
Speaking about website, they have two right now, everipedia.org and iqnetwork.io but as far as I know the idea is to use the latter.
Built on EOS.io
Everipedia is one of the first projects (if not the first) that announced to be building on top of eos.io. If you are not familiar with it, EOS.io is a blockchain software architecture for building decentralized applications. It is scalable, flexible and FAST. It cannot be even compared to other blockchain projects such as Ethereum or Bitcoin, I will write more about it in another post.
What's wrong with Wikipedia and why do we need Everipedia?
I recently found a Quora question on the subject, and even though there were many good answers nobody talked about the most important one.
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least it seems so. But in certain parts of the planet, depending on what you write on those articles some people might remove it because of "reasons". This is a big problem! For example, there are many contributors who created genuine content on Wikipedia and it got deleted because the subject was not "known enough". Isn't it the whole idea with an encyclopedia to share the knowledge we have and get the world know about it?
There are also cases where the content gets censored because of political views. No matter what the reason is, censorship is bad.
Everipedia on the other hand is built on a blockchain, and given its decentralized nature there's no way to censor it or to shut it down. That's the very most important difference from Wikipedia I believe.
Another difference is that Everipedia rewards the users with IQ Tokens. Every time you create an article or propose changes to an existing one, you get rewarded for your effort. And this is fantastic, why would you contribute to Wikipedia for free when you could do exactly the same thing without the risk of being censored while being paid for it on Everipedia?
Editing content on Everipedia
To propose edits, vote on edits, and propose/vote on network governance actions you need so called Brain Power, or BP. You can obtain BP by staking IQ tokens. IQ tokens are staked by locking them up in a 21-day vesting period. This is very similar to Steem which requires you to “power up” (essentially lock and vest) your tokens in order to vote/stake them on content published on the platform. Everipedia actually named "powering up" the process of staking IQ :D.
The IQ tokens that are locked up for 21 days gives you BP at a 1:1 ratio. Bear in mind that brain power is not a fungible or transferable token and can only be spent on Everipedia. You can re-stake the staked IQ tokens after the 21 days lockup period finishes, that way you get more brain power for your edits. You can always buy more IQ tokens if you need more BP during that period of time of course.
Example taken from Everipedia's whitepaper:
A user has 150 IQ tokens. They can call the staking function to lock up their 150 IQ tokens for 21 days and get their account allocated 150 Brain Power to use for proposing edits, governance actions, and voting.
How to stake IQ tokens?
It's pretty easy to do once you are logged in, which you need to do using a tool such as Scatter. Scatter lets you interact with the eos.io blockchain similar to Metamask with the Ethereum blockchain. I will write more about it in another post ;).
Current status of Everipedia
It is currently possible to create articles on it while editing is disabled, at least through iqnetwork.io. According to a conversation I had with them, it should be enabled very soon :).
At the moment rewards are disabled as well, but as far as I know they should be enabled during Q4. You can (and should) follow them on twitter to get more updates about the platform.
Conclusion
Do you like creating content? If you are on Steem chances are you do. In that case, you might take a look at Everipedia, I think it is a very interesting project with a lot of potential!
Do you have any doubts or perhaps you know something I missed? Please leave a comment below!