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Everything2, or E2 for short, is a large collaborative Internet community, currently at www.everything2.com. It describes itself as having "grown from being a very simple user-written encyclopedia to an online community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database of information, insight and humor."
E2 users called noders create pages called nodes and add information in multiple writeups. Only logged-in users can create writeups, and only the author of a writeup or an editor appointed by the site administrators can edit a writeup. Writeups are written in a simplified HTML dialect and do not contain images. As of July 27, 2004, 917,424 nodes and 444,838 writeups existed.
There are other types of nodes that do not contain writeups; for instance, the administrators can create "superdoc" nodes (similar to Wikipedia's ) such as Everything New Nodes and Page of Cool that allow interaction, and each user has a "homenode" where they can add a short autobiography or other text (or a picture, if they are level six or above -- see Rewards , below).
Hard links in E2 are simply words or phrases surrounded by [square brackets]. Any words inside square brackets in a writeup will become a link to the E2 node of that title. If a node with that title does not yet exist, following the link will bring up the option to create it. E2 writeups cannot link outside of E2; to reference an external URL, a noder simply includes it in the writeup as plain text.
At the bottom of every node, the system displays up to 64 soft links, though each node can store an unlimited number thereof. ("Guest User" -- any viewer not logged in -- can see 24, a logged-in user can see up to 48, and the senior administrators ("gods") can see up to 64). These are two-way links intended to approximate "thought processes". Whenever a logged-in user moves from one node to another, be it through a hard link, another soft link, or through the title search box, the system creates (or strengthens) the bidirectional soft link between the two; however, some nodes -- namely the special pages and the user profiles -- will not display the soft links so created. By repeatedly moving from one node to another, users can and do deliberately create such softlinks; some users will use these soft links to make anonymous comments on others' writing.
The copyright for a writeup rests with the author, and no agreement to any kind of license is entered into by writing on E2 (except for giving the site permission to publish). Authors retain the right to place their work in the public domain, release it under a copyleft licence such as GNU or Creative Commons or to request the removal of their work from the site at some later date.
For a long time, the posting of copyrighted song lyrics and poetry to the site without approval from the copyright holders, while certainly frowned upon, was not actually prohibited. E2 chose to only passively enforce copyright law, in a manner similar to an ISP. This policy changed in August 2003 to a more active one where writeups containing copyrighted material had to either conform to fair use guidelines (length limits, proportion of quoted material to new text) or be posted with permission. The policy change provoked some users to leave the community (see "Controversy" below).
The administrators loosely based E2's reward system on role-playing games. Every time a user creates a writeup, they earn one experience point (XP). Users with at least 25 contributed writeups and 50 experience points can vote (up or down) on a writeup, which has a 1/3 chance of giving or taking an experience point from the author depending on the direction of the vote and a 1/5 chance of giving a point to the voter. After voting on a writeup, a noder can see the writeup's "reputation," or number of positive and negative votes (editors do not need to vote to see a writeup's reputation). The site's editors delete writeups that do not meet editorial standards or those whose removal has been author-requested. The only effect writeup deletion has on the author's XPs is that the 1 XP the author got for creating the writeup is removed.
New levels are attained by reaching a predefined, but arbitrary total of XPs and writeups, which are given in the FAQ. An 'honor roll' further rewards users whose writeups have a 'reputation' that has achieved a high interquartile mean by lowering the writeups required to achieve any given level by up to a half.
The system grants special powers at other levels of writeups and experience, such as "cool" (reward author with three XPs and send the writeup to the front page), the ability to create basic chat rooms on the site, space for uploading a picture to a user's "homenode", and the ability to hide one's self in the list of logged-in users.
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