Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger has joined a company that aims to put the encyclopedia on a blockchain.
Everipedia, which started off as an alternative to Wikipedia in 2015, is now building the world's first encyclopedia on the blockchain. Dr. Sanger has joined the company’s executive team as Chief Information Officer.
"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," Dr. 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."
In addition, the company also announced that it is working on a new peer-to-peer wiki network that adds an incentive structure and a distributed backend hosted within a blockchain. Under the new system, users will be rewarded with tokens for curating articles and everyone would be able to become a stakeholder in the network through those tokens, which are pegged to the value of the network. Everipedia said that this model would make feasible a fully autonomous encyclopedia without the need for advertisements or donations.
“The Everipedia network provides a new paradigm change and knowledge economy to disrupt the old centralized Internet knowledge encyclopedia model. We are creating this network using the cutting-edge technology of EOS.io software," said Everipedia co-founder and CTO, Travis Moore.
