How This ‘Crypto Wikipedia’ is Using GIS Mapping Data to Verify Crowdsourced Contributions
Everipedia, the crypto community’s answer to Wikipedia (which has all the articles Wikipedia had at the time of the fork in 2017), will be using geospatial blockchain technology provided by XYO to verify the validity of point-of-interest information on the decentralized encyclopedia.
The decentralized Wikipedia alternative has an incentive structure using the IQ cryptocurrency, an EOS token. The Wikipedia alternative has the backing of Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger, who joined the project prior to its launch. XYO is a geospatial blockchain company that provides accurate data location. What do the two have in common? Well, they’re working on a project that will enable Everipedia users to prove the value of their knowledge.
WIKIPEDIA ALTERNATIVE IS ITS CRYPTO COUSIN
The new technology will work primarily with points of interest, at least at first, although Everipedia foresees other uses of XYO’s services. Co-founder Markus Levin, also XYO’s Head of Operations, told CCN:
“We enable users to prove their knowledge. Let’s say you’re writing about the Statue of Liberty and you’re in India. You’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty. Your knowledge is second-source. It has a different qualifier than if you’re a professor of history and you’ve been to the Statue of Liberty many times. You’re a primary source.”
VALIDITY OF INFORMATION BOLSTERED BY LOCATION DATA
CCN had an exclusive opportunity to talk to representatives from both companies about the partnership. We got some background on the Everipedia project from co-founder Theodor Forselius, who told us:
The project now has a couple million monthly users and over 1 million original articles. The content standards are entirely determined by the community of IQ token users. Submitting a new article incurs a cost in crypto tokens. If an edit or new article is approved by other users, the submitter gets their stake back plus a bit more from the network. If not, the funds are held for a period of time and eventually returned to the user. The incentive structure aligns to seriously discourage spam and low-quality posting. The Wikipedia approach to this has been a massive staff of volunteer editors who have arguably created an environment actually unfriendly to the free exchange of information.
MASS ADOPTION REQUIRES BROAD INTEREST
Forselius believes that non-financial applications of decentralized technologies are what will most likely cross over into mass adoption.
Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world. As a non-profit, it cannot pay its own costs. Instead, it does an annual fundraiser as a non-profit, relying every year on users to pay the bills. Wikipedia also obeys censorship restrictions around the world.
By contrast, Everipedia is censorship-resistant. It runs on IPFS, the “permanent web.”
The Everipedia co-founder said of mass adoption:
“The main issue with the blockchain space and the state of dApps right now is it’s too much about blockchain and crypto. The terminology and the marketing, front-facing stuff for the users. So I think what’s really going to take a project like Everipedia to the masses is focusing on being a better product. We want to attract users because we are superior to Wikipedia.”
ENTERPRISE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR CRYPTO CREED, THEY CARE ABOUT PERFORMANCE
Markus Levin agrees that superiority of the technology is its primary selling point, not the buzz around blockchain and cryptocurrency. He said:
“We work with enterprises and it’s always solutions-based, right? They don’t call it a blockchain company. It’s all about the solutions we provide. It happens to be powered by blockchain. We have a number of companies coming in and out of our office every day, and it’s always, okay, you provide ledgers that are immutable, or you can certify the data, and so on. It’s always about the solution and the opportunity versus the blockchain. We differ from a lot of blockchain companies in this respect.”
The new system that will enable writers and photographers to verify their first-hand knowledge of subjects will be available to Everipedia users sometime in the second quarter. As a side note, Everipedia’s Theodor Forselius told us that Everipedia presents a new opportunity for people in places like India, where Wikipedia has a growing user base, to potentially earn a living or a secondary income by contributing to articles on the country.
