Wikipedia Co-Founder Sanger Joins Blockchain ‘Everipedia’ As CIO

Job Appointments | December 12, 2017 By:

Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger has joined venture-backed startup Everipedia as its chief information officer.

Sanger has been involved with various online encyclopedia projects. He is the former editor-in-chief of Nupedia, chief organizer of its successor, Wikipedia, and founding editor-in-chief of Citizendium. From his position at Nupedia, he assembled the process for article development. Sanger proposed implementing a wiki, which led directly to the creation of Wikipedia. He was Wikipedia’s early community leader and established many of its original policies. In 2002, Sanger left Wikipedia and has since been critical of the project.

“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,’ said Sanger. “In an era of misinformation, the world stands to benefit enormously from a transparent, immutable and decentralized protocol for accessing and sharing knowledge. “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.”

Launched in December 2014, Everipedia is a crowd-sourced wiki​ platform, online encyclopedia​, and knowledge base​. Its stated aim is to modernize, consolidate, and decentralize governance of the online encyclopedia. The company aims to do this by developing a new open source, peer-to-peer wiki network with an incentive structure and a distributed backend hosted within a blockchain.

Everipedia is hoping that by using blockchain, it can widen the sources of knowledge for article subjects beyond particular types of editors. 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. The company claims the new 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,” said Everipedia co-founder and CTO Travis Moore. “We are creating this network using the cutting-edge technology of EOS.io software,”