Swede Theodor Forselius intends to press the pedestal itself Wiki. The 22-year-old entrepreneur has become a co-founder of Everipedia (Euripedia). Its goal is to make the site the leading online encyclopedia of the Internet. Forselius began to develop the idea of an alternative site in 2015. After graduating from the Higher School of Entrepreneurship in his homeland, in 2014 he moved to the United States, where he started working on Everipedia.
The founder and president of the company is Sam Kazemyan. Co-founders - Forselius, Mahbod Mohadam (known as co-founder of the popular music platform Genius.com) and Travis Moore.
At the end of last year, the founder of Wikipedia Larry Sanger joined the project team as CIO.
The ambitious project was invested by the cryptobank of Galaxy Digital, Mike Novograts. The amount of investments was $ 30 000 000. These funds will be used to create a block-platform, internal crypto-currency and a new business model.
"We are pleased to support the project and look forward to the emergence of a more modern and inclusive encyclopedia using advanced block-technology," said co-owner Novograz.
Forselius commented positively: "Many doubted that we will be able to compete with one of the largest sites in the world. Now that we have enough money and an invaluable resource - one of the founders of Wikipedia - we are taken more seriously. "
Why blockade?
The backbone of Euripedia consists of former editors of Wikipedia - the most progressive part of it. Their experience has shown that the content editing system in the Wiki is outdated, it is necessary to review the publication criteria and move to a more flexible policy. Part of the audience was pulled by the search engines and social networks, which showed rapid growth in a few years and went far ahead - the team felt that Wikipedia is standing still.
According to Kazemyan, the decentralized platform should give the project a second wind.
Blocking provides an opportunity to use a different business model than Wikipedia. The founder of the project wanted, that financing of Everipedia differed from system of donations or the publication of banners.
Blockchain-protocol will help make the editing process on the site more transparent.
Owners of internal crypto currency will be able to create new articles, track activity on the site and update articles. Tokens also give the right to vote and evaluate the quality of the material added to the site.
Holders of crypto-moneys who want to make changes to the content will have to leave a small deposit. This method will help to stop the influx of Internet trolls and avoid questionable edits of articles, therefore, to improve the quality of content .
In addition, the use of crypto currency as a calculation will add financial incentives to users. So, for editing an article on Everipedia, you will need to pay in tokens. If the changes do not improve its quality, the coins are burned. For successful editing, the user receives a fee in the crypto currency.
And one more reason why the choice fell on the decentralized structure is the desire to avoid censorship by the authorities and dependence on the business lobby.
Curiously, the decision to implement the blockchain convinced Larry Zanger to join the project, which predicted at the time: "Wikipedia will be able to improve competition, but it is necessary to make major changes with caution, so it will take some time." Such is the side profit :)
Online encyclopedia is visited monthly by more than 3 million unique users. The content for Everpeedy is created by several thousand active editors. The number of articles was 6 million and continues to grow. Although up to the volumes of Wikipedia, which contains more than 40 million articles, it is still far away.
