- Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has spoken at the Malta Delta Summit about his new venture, Everipedia
- Everipedia compensates contributors with crypto tokens that can be traded on exchanges
- Wikipedia currently suffers from a shortage of contributors due to the lack of compensation
Wikipedia is one of the greatest gifts of modern technology. 17 years running, it is still the go to source of information on almost everything you might ever be curious about. Wikipedia, and in particular their founder Larry Sanger, is keeping up with the modern times through Everipedia.org, its blockchain-based arm.
This new site isn’t merely an extension of the famous crowdsourced knowledge base but is one that improves on it and avoids some of the vulnerabilities of its predecessor.
First of all, it is able to get around international censorship, an issue which has caused some strife for Wikipedia. It also eliminates centralized bureaucracy and provides token incentives for those who contribute to the platform.
In many ways, Everipedia is a step forward from Wikipedia. As Sanger himself said, “Thanks to new technology, it’s now possible to move beyond Wikipedia just as we moved beyond Britannica almost two decades ago.”
Acknowledging Challenges
At the Malta Delta Summit, Larry Sanger touched on what he feels are the biggest problems with Wikipedia.
One of those, he noted, is the lack of consistent contributors. Despite bringing in billions of page views a year, Wikipedia has only 12,000 editors with only 129,672 active contributors.
This means that only an extremely small fraction of people regularly contribute to Wikipedia in contrast to the mammoth crowd that benefits from it.
In Sanger’s opinion, this is due to lack of compensation incentives for contributors.
According to statistics, 71 percent of the people who contribute to Wikipedia do it for the sheer joy of sharing knowledge. While it is a noble incentive, it is not nearly enough to bring in the number of contributors the platform wants.
Everipedia to the rescue
With their new platform, however, this is going to be corrected. Everipedia has its own IQ tokens that contributors are compensated with.
These tokens can be traded on cryptocurrency exchanges for other cryptocurrencies or fiat.
They can also be used as a voting tool with which contributors can make decisions affecting Everpedia’s management.
Whether the power to shape Everpedia’s management is enough of a usecase to shore up a reasonable price for the token – only time and the market can tell.
