Everipedia wants to become a truly decentralized encyclopedia powered by blockchain technology, contrary to a centralized internet knowledge encyclopedia model similar to that of Wikipedia. The goal of Everipedia is to ultimately provide an incentive structure and a distributed backend hosted on the EOS blockchain.
A 2017 study by the Purdue University proved that 77 percent of all Wikipedia articles were written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors. The results of the study showed that statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day. This research study demonstrated that Wikipedia is way less decentralized than one would assume. Everipedia wants to solve this problem by creating a different incentive structure with the end goal to make the knowledge base more decentralized.
Censorship of Wikipedia has occurred in several countries, including China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Syria, but also in Western countries as France and the United Kingdom. This censorship often is related to widespread internet censorship because of political reasons. Other cases of censorship are indicative of measures to prevent the viewing of specific content deemed offensive. As the articles on Everipedia are hosted on the EOS blockchain, no content can be censored.
All holders of the IQ tokens are incentivized to create quality, neutral information and are motivated to work together in building the reputation of the Everipedia content. This is done by creating a financial incentive to create good and reliable knowledge. Similar to the Steem blockchain, there will be up to 5% inflation annually in IQ tokens. Those tokens will then be used to pay curators and editors, among others. IQ is a utility token that can be used to edit and create new pages, and vote on whether or not a page should be edited or published.
Everipedia was founded in 2014 as a “fork” of Wikipedia and in 2017 the company announced to move their storage to the EOS blockchain so to make their content censorship resistant. Everipedia launched on the EOS blockchain on August 9, 2018 and is currently operational. The IQ tokens serve as an incentive to create quality content.
