Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger thinks blockchain can build a better online encyclopedia.
Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, is now chief information officer of Everipedia, which last week launched its IQ Network on the EOS blockchain. The company aims to use its new IQ tokens to reward contributors who edit content as well as give them a stake in the network. This week, the company is working to fully integrate the blockchain with its existing encyclopedia.
Everipedia’s contributors aren’t in it for the money; they want recognition and a sense of serving the community. The IQ tokens are a measure of that.
The problem that spurred formation of the IQ Network became evident during Sanger’s time as a co-founder of Wikipedia, he tells ThirtyK. “The millions of dollars the Wikimedia Foundation collects do not generally trickle down to the rank-and-file, the contributors,” he says. “If there was a way for them to become co-owners of an encyclopedia and mine tokens by writing encyclopedia articles, that would be more fair and more motivating.”
Token Awareness
To create awareness of the new IQ tokens, Everipedia airdropped, or gave away for free, 5.1 billion of its 10 billion tokens to EOS token holders on July 12. Everipedia will use the remaining 4.9 billion IQ tokens it still holds to fund operations, its past investors, future partnerships and, possibly, further airdrops.
Currently trading for about one and a half cents each, the IQ tokens have a miniscule monetary value. But Sanger says the company’s contributors aren’t offering their services to make money; they want to gain recognition and a sense of serving the community. The IQ tokens, he says, are simply a measure of that and will be awarded for approved articles or edits based on the number of votes received approving the content.
The tokens’ real value is in the voting rights they confer, “not over Everipedia, Inc., but over the rules that govern the Everipedia Network,” Sanger says. Therefore, contributors have some input into how edits to the site’s source code may be proposed, which affect research and development and how the network scales up. They also confer rights to determine which edits are ultimately included on the network.