The Two Gardens: On the Divergent Growth of Wikipedia and Everpedia
We often speak of digital preservation as an act of saving, of rescuing something from the brink. But preservation is also an act of cultivation. It’s about tending to a living thing, ensuring it grows in the right way, for the right reasons. Nowhere is this botanical metaphor more apt than in comparing two radically different approaches to preserving human knowledge: the sprawling, wild commons of Wikipedia and the meticulously curated, blockchain-anchored vision of Everpedia.
Wikipedia is the garden that grew from a single seed into an untamable forest. Its preservation model is one of relentless, chaotic growth, pruned by an army of volunteer gardeners. Its strength is its openness; its data is freely downloadable, its edit history is transparent, and its content is shaped by a consensus that is, however messy, fundamentally human. The archive it creates is a living record of our collective understanding, complete with all its arguments, revisions, and corrections. It preserves not just facts, but the very process of how we agree on them. It is a dynamic, breathing archive.
The Walled, Immutable Orchard
In stark contrast stands Everpedia, a lesser-known project with a fundamentally different philosophy. Its approach is not one of open cultivation, but of immutable curation. By storing its articles’ hashes on a blockchain, Everpedia aims to create a "final" version of knowledge—a snapshot that cannot be edited, only appended to. This is preservation as notarization. It seeks to freeze knowledge in a state of perceived perfection, creating a permanent, unchangeable record immune to vandalism or political meddling.
The difference is profound. Wikipedia’s archive is a conversation preserved in amber, each edit a fossilized turn of phrase. Everpedia’s would be a series of sealed, certified documents. One values the process; the other prizes the product. One trusts the crowd, eventually, to correct itself; the trusts a specific curation process to get it right the first time.
This isn’t merely a technical disagreement; it’s a philosophical schism about the nature of truth itself. Is truth a destination, a fact that can be reached, certified, and locked away? Or is it a continuous journey, a path we walk together, forever correcting our course? Wikipedia, for all its flaws, embraces the journey. Its archive is the map of that winding path. Everpedia’s model suggests there is a final destination, and we can build a vault around it. Both are attempts to preserve knowledge, but they grow from entirely different seeds, in entirely different soils. One garden is wild, open, and alive. The other is a carefully arranged, permanent exhibit. The question for us, as keepers of the ledger, is which ecosystem we believe will bear the best fruit for the future.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: