Everything2 - Wikipedia Jump to content Main menu Main menu move to sidebar hide Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Special pages Search Search Appearance Donate Create account Log in Personal tools Donate Create account Log in Contents move to sidebar hide (Top) 1 History 2 Community Toggle Community subsection 2.1 Policies 2.2 Nodes and writeups 3 Copyright practice 4 Rewards 5 Messaging 6 Links Toggle Links subsection 6.1 Hard links 6.2 Pipe links 6.3 Soft links 6.4 Firm links 7 Software 8 Reception Toggle Reception subsection 8.1 Media coverage 8.2 Academic studies 9 See also 10 References 11 External links Toggle the table of contents Everything2 14 languages Azərbaycanca Deutsch Esperanto Español فارسی Suomi Français Magyar Italiano Português Русский Simple English Svenska Türkçe Edit links Article Talk English Read Edit View history Tools Tools move to sidebar hide Actions Read Edit View history General What links here Related changes Upload file Permanent link Page information Cite this page Get shortened URL Switch to legacy parser Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikidata item Appearance move to sidebar hide From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Web-based community This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs more citations. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Everything2" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "Everything2" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message) {{cite news |url=https://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/11/21/net.gen.encyclopedias.idg/index.html |title=The next generation of online encyclopedias |last=Frauenfelder |first=Mark |website=CNN.com |date=November 21, 2000 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040814034109/https://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/11/21/net.gen.encyclopedias.idg/index.html |archive-date=August 14, 2004 |url-status=dead}}</ref>"},"launch_date":{"wt":"March 1998 (as Everything1)"},"current_status":{"wt":"Active"},"revenue":{"wt":""}},"i":0}}]}'>Everything2Screenshot of Everything2.com Type of site General writers site Available in English Owner Everything2 Media LLC Founder Nathan Oostendorp[1] URL everything2.com Commercial No Registration Required for write access Launched March 1998 (as Everything1) Current status Active Everything2 (styled Everything2 or E2 for short) is a collaborative online community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material. E2 is moderated for quality, but has no formal policy on subject matter. Writing on E2 covers a wide range of topics and genres, including encyclopedic articles, diary entries (known as "daylogs"), poetry, humor, and fiction. History [edit] Founder Nathan Oostendorp in 2012 The predecessor of E2 was a similar database called Everything (later labeled "Everything1" or "E1") which was started around March 1998 by Nathan Oostendorp and was initially closely aligned with and promoted by the technology-related news website Slashdot (by virtue of various key principals having attended the Holland Christian High School), even sharing (at the time) some administrators.[2] The Everything2 software offered vastly more features, and the Everything1 data was twice incorporated into E2: once on November 13, 1999, and again in January 2000. The Everything2 server used to be colocated with the Slashdot servers. However, some time after OSDN acquired Slashdot, and moved the Slashdot servers, this hosting was terminated on short notice. This resulted in Everything2 being offline from roughly November 6 to December 9, 2003. Everything2 was then hosted by the University of Michigan for a time. As the Everything2 site put it on October 2, 2006: Now, we have an arrangement with the University of Michigan, located in Ann Arbor. We exist thanks to their generosity (which is motivated by their academic curiosity, I suppose). They gave us some servers and act as our ISP, free of charge, and all they ask in exchange is that we not display advertisements.[3] The Everything2 servers were moved to the nearby Michigan State University in February 2007. E2 was privately owned by the Blockstackers Intergalactic company,[4] but does not make a profit and is viewed by its long-term users as a collaborative work-in-progress. Until mid-2007 it accepted donations of money and, on occasion, of computer hardware but no longer does so. Some of its administrators are affiliated with Blockstackers, some are not. The site is not a democracy, and the degree to which users influence decisions depends on the nature of the decisions and the administrators making them. As of January 23, 2012, it was announced that the site had been sold to long-time user and coder Jay Bonci under the name Everything2 Media LLC. Writeups in E1 were limited to 512 bytes in size. This, plus the predominantly "geek" membership back then and the lack of chat facilities, meant the early work was often of poor quality and was filled with self-referential humor. As E2 has expanded, stricter quality standards have developed, much of the old material has been removed, and the membership has become broader in interest, although smaller in number. Many noders prefer to write encyclopedic articles similar to those on Wikipedia (and indeed some actively contribute to both E2 and Wikipedia). Some write fiction or poetry, some discuss issues, and some write daily journals, called "daylogs." Unlike Wikipedia, E2 does not have an enforced neutral point of view. An informal survey of noder political beliefs[5] indicates that the user base tends to lean left politically. There are conservative voices as well, however, and while debate nodes (of any kind, political or not) are rarely tolerated, well-formed points of view from any part of the political or cultural spectrum are. Despite predating Wikipedia as a collaborative user-generated online encyclopedia, Everything2 never achieved Wikipedia's level of popularity. Information science scholar Cliff Lampe ascribes this to a combination of factors including "editorial issues" and Everything2's launch before the dot-com crash.[6]: 80  According to E2's "Site Trajectory",[7] traffic has dropped from 9976 new write-ups created in the month of August 2000, down to 93 new write-ups in February 2017. Community [edit] Policies [edit] Some of the management regard Everything2 as a publication, to which authors submit content. Although Everything2 does not seek to become an encyclopedia, a substantial amount of factual content has been submitted to Everything2. Policy states that "Everything2 is not a bulletin board." Writeups which exist as replies to other writeups, or which add a minor point to them or which otherwise do not stand well alone are discouraged, not least because the deletion of the original writeup orphans any replies. This policy helps to moderate flame wars on controversial topics. Everything2 is not a wiki, and there is no direct way for non-content editors to make corrections or amendments to another author's article. Avenues for correction involve discussing the writeup with its author; petitioning a content editor; adding a note in a special "broken nodes" section; or superseding the original writeup with an original, stand-alone follow-up. Nodes and writeups [edit] E2 users called noders create entries called nodes and add information in multiple writeups. Only logged-in users can create writeups, and only the author of a writeup or an editor appointed by the site administrators can edit a writeup. E2 categorizes writeups into thirteen types: person, place, idea, thing, dream, personal, fiction, poetry, review, log, recipe, essay, and event. Two additional writeup types, lede and definition, are usable only by editors and are applied retroactively. Writeups are written in a simplified HTML dialect and do not contain images. There are other types of nodes that do not contain writeups; for instance, the administrators can create "superdoc" nodes (similar to Wikipedia's special pages) such as Everything New Nodes and Page of Cool that allow interaction, and each user has a "homenode" where he or she can add a short autobiography or other text (or a picture, if the user has posted ten writeups—see Rewards, below). Copyright practice [edit] The copyright in a writeup rests with the author, and no agreement to any kind of license is entered into by writing on E2 (except for giving the site permission to publish). Authors retain the right to place their work in the public domain, to release it under a copyleft license such as one of those offered by the GNU project or Creative Commons, or to request the removal of their work from the site at some later date. For a long time, the posting of copyrighted song lyrics and poetry to the site without approval from the copyright holders, while certainly frowned upon, was not actually prohibited. E2 chose to only passively enforce copyright law, in a manner similar to an ISP (for which see OCILLA section 512(c)). This policy changed in August 2003 to a more active one where writeups containing copyrighted material had to either conform to fair use guidelines (length limits, proportion of quoted material to new text) or be posted with permission. Rewards [edit] The administrators loosely based E2's incentive system on a dual currency system borrowed from many role-playing games. Users may earn experience points ("XP"), which count strictly toward level progress, or convertible currency ("GP"), which may be used to purchase lesser, temporary privileges. Every time a user creates a writeup, he or she earns five XP. Users with at least ten contributed writeups and 500 experience points can vote (up or down) on a writeup. A positive vote grants the writeup's author one experience point while also having a roughly one-third chance of giving one GP to the voter. After voting on a writeup, a noder can see the writeup's "reputation," or number of positive and negative votes (staff do not need to vote in order to see a writeup's reputation). The site's editors may remove writeups that do not meet editorial standards from public view. Authors have the ability to withdraw their own writeups. In both cases the removed writeup is sent to its author's personal "drafts" space, where it may be prepared for re-submission or deleted. The only effect writeup deletion has on the author's account is that the five XP granted for creating the writeup is removed. Writeups deleted before March 2011 are visible to the author on a legacy page called "Node Heaven"; newer or more recently removed items become drafts. New levels are attained by reaching a predefined, but arbitrary total of XP and writeups, which are given in the FAQ.[8] The system grants special powers at certain experience levels, such as "cool", which rewards the author with 20 XP and sends the writeup to the "cool user picks" column on the front page; the ability to create basic chat rooms on the site; space for uploading a picture to a user's "homenode"; and the ability to hide one's self in the list of logged-in users. Website views used to be tracked, but due to a glitch this ability was removed. The glitch looped the view counter and crashed the site on more than one occasion. Messaging [edit] Everything2 provides two communication tools: the …