The less strict notability requirement is really just the tip of the iceberg. We also have all these pages that people are searching on Wiki for that they don’t have. They don’t have it, but we might, which is what has allowed us to grow so fast. The site is really just, in every way, shape, and form, a better version of Wikipedia. That means the software is much, much easier to use. It’s very easy to access and edit from your phone.

We’re more friendly in terms of building an inclusive community of involved users. You get IQ for your contributions, and you also get badges. Users receive a lot more recognition for their contributions than on Wikipedia. It’s also less prohibitive for registered users to edit and contribute on our site, whereas on Wikipedia, only a select few who are in a sort of “cool kids club” get to write.

There are also verified accounts for celebrities. Snoop Dogg is not allowed to edit his own Wikipedia page, but on Everipedia, Snoop Dogg can get his own verified account, and people will know that anything he says is coming from Snoop Dogg himself. Verified pages have a check mark next to it.

We also allow voting on the footnotes. One problem with Wikipedia is that Wikipedia has cited footnotes, but a lot of people don't even know they're there. On Everipedia, the footnotes are more front and center. Anyone can comment on any footnote, and you can go to them directly from the site. It doesn't just give you the random name of a book that you can't even find anywhere. It's all things that you can verify right there. You can also upvote or downvote them. On Wikipedia footnotes are an afterthought, whereas for us the footnotes are front and center. It’s also a restriction, though, because we only accept web based sources for the aforementioned reason.

Right now, we have a lot of pages that Wikipedia specifically doesn't have, like characters from TV shows that aren't notable enough to be mentioned in the Wikipedia pages. We have “Love & Hip Hop” character pages that have over 100,000 page views. That’s clearly shows there's a demographic and an area of content that Wikipedia is missing out on, even though it's the number 7 biggest site in the world.

Since it's a non-profit, Wikipedia says anyone can actually take the sum total of their articles, even for profit purposes, as long as they say that it's from Wikipedia. We're working right now to actually import all of Wikipedia to the site. Basically, we're trying to fork Wikipedia, and bring it over to Everipedia, so that it's just Wikipedia plus everything else that's unique to our own site. This ensures that we won't have any real deficiencies to speak of. Obviously, we're going to cite Wikipedia as one of the primary sources that an article comes from. We're already starting to test some of those scrapings.

Although the community is still not big, it's expanding. It's just so much easier for people to get involved. At Wikipedia, they kind of treat it like a club that you need to be invited into. The people who are already contributing aren’t getting paid in money, so the only thing they have is their pride. Part of their pride is excluding other people from joining their exclusive club, but we're trying to actually actively get people to join us and contribute, the same way that I was doing at Rap Genius.

I think we're going to have a contributor-to-consumer ratio that is more similar to Rap Genius, than to Wikipedia, which would be huge. Rap Genius has a way, way bigger chunk. It's closer to 1% of people contributing in some way, whereas Wikipedia is not even close to that. Wikipedia makes it so difficult. You can't even figure it out. Even if you really, really wanted to contribute to Wikipedia, you’d have to learn wiki markups to do it, which I've tried, and I failed. Even though I’m not a technical person, I’m a website person, and if even I can't figure out wiki markups, I doubt most high school or college kids would be able to. Basically, the only person who could figure it out is someone who has some experience with software development. That's a pretty small pool of people who would even be capable of contributing to Wikipedia, which also explains its messed up demographics. It's basically a bunch of young tech guys who are running Wikipedia, whereas any other site you look at, it's more of a cross-section of society. There's all kinds of people who contribute to Rap Genius. That's because the software is really easy to use.

People are really interested in getting involved. Usually the first thing they want to add is stuff that they're really passionate about: their own companies, themselves, or their friends. Then as they use the site (and it's easy to understand how to make pages, merge pages, edit, link, and cite), they start branching out to the other content. We learned that the more modern our site looked--the more closer to Facebook or other social media sites it is in terms of usage, like messaging or editing--the easier it is for people to hop on.

They usually hop on by making something that they're really knowledgeable about, mainly either themselves, their company, or something in their hometown. Then they get more involved, and quickly start making much more complicated nuanced pages. We have one of our editors who's always on the site. He was making very sophisticated pages about cancer, different types of cancer treatments, and “starving cancer versus chemo starving cancer”--things that weren’t even on Wikipedia. Its unique content in the scientific realm is unique to Everipedia right now. People first start by editing stuff that's really basic, and then branching out.

My co-founders, Sam and Teddy, have been working on the site for a year before I (Mahbod) got involved. It was about 6 months after I had left Rap Genius, and I was giving a talk at UCLA. At my talk, Sam came up to me, and he showed me my Everipedia page. I had a eureka moment, because I had coincidentally been trying to get my own Wikipedia page. I tried to put it up myself but it got taken down. Then I even had someone who was more experienced help me out with it, but it still got taken down. When I saw myself on Everipedia, I thought, "This is amazing. If I wanted this so bad, there's probably millions of people like me." That turned into our pitch. The way that we pitch Everipedia to people is by starting a page about the person, or about their company, and then say, "This is you. This is your wiki, and you can improve it." Then someone jumps in and starts improving it, and by then they've learned how to use the site, and it becomes one of their tools.

Everyone reads Wikipedia, but very few people actually know people who have contributed to the site. Everyone uses Google; they use it just as much as they read it. Facebook pages can be built by anyone, but no one actually contributes to Wikipedia at all. So our whole point was, with that observation in mind, if we could get even just a small amount of engagement, if we could just get 1 or 2 percent of people that read Everipedia to contribute, which is actually an order of magnitude more than Wikipedia, the ratio to contributors to readers, we would be as big or bigger than Wikipedia itself.

There are over 4,000 registered users on Everipedia. Before, we had a handful of people every day that would come on, sign up, try the site, edit existing pages, and make new ones. But in the past 2 months, there's been so many new people coming and trying the site, that it's almost hard for even all of us that drive it, to just keep track of all the new people, message them, and reach out to them. Sometimes people do slip through the cracks, just because there's so many of them. Some uncited content gets on the site, and it takes a day or two to really get it reviewed. It’s growing really fast. I don't have a specific ratio, but at this point, just us at the office, which includes me (Mahbod), Travis, George, Christian, and Navin, is almost too few people to keep track of everything right now. At this point it's a bit overwhelming even with five people, but it’s a positive first world problem to have.