Charles Hoskinson Interviews Everipedia's Sam Kazemian

Cardano finally earns a Wikipedia page after editors called the project non-notable for years, despite once being worth more than Tesla and SpaceX with a market cap over 30 billion dollars.

Cardano's Wikipedia page had been rejected in favor of pages for Titcoin, a deprecated 2015 project, and Charles's own 1992 video game Legends of Valor, until community complaints reached Sam Kazemian at Everipedia.

Charles rarely does interviews, with the last one being alongside Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET; today's guest is Sam Kazemian of Everipedia to explore what problem the platform solves.

Kazemian, co-founder and president of Everipedia, got into crypto around 2013 mining altcoins, started building Everipedia in 2015 before blockchain tech had caught up, then picked EOS around 2017 to 2018 to build it as a decentralized knowledge protocol.

Everipedia's content, such as text and media, is stored through IPFS and peer to peer channels, while consensus on article state is incentivized by staking the IQ token.

Wikipedia's original sin, in Kazemian's view, is the same notability standard and structure Cardano just clashed with back when Everipedia started in 2015.

Wikipedia digitized Britannica's classical print definition of 'encyclopedic' largely unchanged since Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded the site as Nupedia around 2000 and 2001.

Kazemian calls himself a genuine fan of Wikipedia's lack of tracking and direct advertising, crediting it as one of the internet's few real bright spots even while criticizing its rules.

Kazemian argues digital, community curated content should grow without an artificial notability cutoff, since unpopular topics simply go unread rather than needing removal, unlike a printed encyclopedia.

Everipedia grew to millions of monthly page views before moving onto a blockchain, mostly from people searching for Wikipedia style pages on up and coming reporters, influencers, entrepreneurs and startups.

Kazemian compares Everipedia's early appeal to why Crunchbase exists, since Wikipedia's reluctance to cover startups pushed that search demand elsewhere.

Kazemian's definition of an encyclopedia is an article that neutrally cites all reputably sourced positions on a topic rather than taking one side, something Wikipedia mostly achieves but has drifted from as topics turn partisan.

Kazemian illustrates neutrality with California's Proposition 22, the Uber and Lyft driver classification measure: a well written article should read as fair to both labor unions and to Uber's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

Neutrality between opposing viewpoints works for a political ballot measure, but Charles asks how the same standard applies when one side is grounded in scientific consensus, using climate change as the test case.

Kazemian admits deciding how much air time scientific consensus deserves against fringe positions is one of Wikipedia's genuine weak points and a question Everipedia hasn't fully solved either.

Everipedia was itself cited by Springer, a major academic publisher, and at peer reviewed conferences, yet Wikipedia editors rejected those as non-credible citations.

Kazemian criticizes Wikipedia for leaning on the same circa-2000 list of credible sources without updating for the internet age's newer ways of synthesizing and publishing knowledge.

Charles recalls a famous author whose Wikipedia page misstated his own book's inspiration; editors refused to fix it until a New York Post article about the dispute could itself be cited as a source.

Charles recounts his own Wikipedia dispute: editors would not accept his official IOHK photo or a Creative Commons release from him personally, then rejected a cell phone selfie he took specifically to prove ownership.

Kazemian recalls an identical experience: Wikipedia demanded proof he personally took his own photo, and after he confirmed it was shot with a tripod, editors simply stopped replying and kept the old picture.

Using abortion as the test case, Charles asks who decides both completeness and fairness when pro-life advocates call it murder and pro-choice advocates fundamentally disagree with the framing.

Kazemian admits true fairness is ultimately an intuitive philosophical grapple, since even basic word choices, like calling it a fetus versus an unborn child, can't escape taking a side.

Kazemian describes Larry Sanger's Encyclosphere concept: multiple disjoint encyclopedias sharing one interchangeable protocol, similar to how Conservapedia split from Wikipedia but without any shared communicative standard.

Kazemian is proud that Everipedia draws praise from both conservative and progressive readers as fair; Larry Sanger is booked to present the Encyclosphere idea at an Everipedia engineering seminar on the ninth.

Charles reveals he double majored in neuroscience and philosophy at UCLA, and credits long running debates with Larry Sanger, a trained philosopher, for shaping his own views on neutrality.

Charles poses a knowledge categorization thought experiment: if humanity lost the Bible to amnesia it could never be reconstructed, but if it forgot the physical laws of gravity it would eventually rediscover them empirically.

History keeps repeating this loss and rediscovery pattern, Charles notes, citing the Minoans' geothermal heating and indoor plumbing around 1500 BC that civilization didn't match again for over two thousand years.

Kazemian admits it's controversial, but Everipedia deliberately brings market dynamics through the IQ token to incentivize categorizing and maintaining different kinds of knowledge, calling the whole platform a grand experiment like Bitcoin itself.

Contrary to expectations, Kazemian says basic science and historical content get the most edits and upkeep on Everipedia, not clickbait or breaking news, since the market rewards genuine intellectual curiosity as much as page view chasing.

Everipedia forked Wikipedia's five million English articles under a Creative Commons license, and Kazemian says its science pages get edited as much as its coverage of new influencers and cryptocurrencies, even though Wikipedia still wins most search traffic for established topics like quantum mechanics.

Charles asks whether the IQ token is a required stake to edit, like a fee, or an earned reward closer to Steemit's model.

New Everipedia users get a minimum IQ stake for free just by signing in with Twitter, Facebook or email, removing the barrier of having to buy cryptocurrency before making a first edit.

Charles compares the Everipedia to IQ token relationship to Steemit's relationship with Steem; Kazemian agrees but flags the risk that IQ holders could become as ideologically calcified as Wikipedia editors, just with money involved.

Kazemian floats 'colored' IQ tokens split by topic, such as conservative, liberal or math IQ, effectively a decentralized Stack Exchange for encyclopedias built on the same underlying protocol.

Charles asks whether the token's own incentive to keep growing in value will override whales' personal biases, drawing a parallel to how Bitcoin's security assumes transaction fees will eventually replace the shrinking block reward.

Charles asks what KPIs prove Everipedia is actually converging on neutral, uncensored knowledge rather than just claiming it, comparing it to how Cardano tracks stake pool operator counts as proof Ouroboros is decentralizing.

Kazemian's core anti-censorship argument is architectural: every article's stakes, votes and hash history live on chain, so no single website or team can co-opt the protocol, the same way no exchange can cut off access to Bitcoin.

Charles presses further that an immutable edit history proves knowledge can't be erased, but doesn't by itself prove the surviving content is neutral or high quality, since not all preserved knowledge is created equal.

Kazemian's clearest KPI: Everipedia now hosts over 1.5 million articles beyond Wikipedia's original five million forked pages, including Cardano's own article after Wikipedia deleted it, reaching about 20 percent of Wikipedia's scale in a fraction of the time.

Charles cites Wikipedia's Proof of Stake article as low quality evidence: it still only covers early designs like NXT from 2012 to 2013 while ignoring Cardano, EOS and Polkadot, with IOHK's edits repeatedly flagged as spam and reverted, hurting Dan Larimer as much as Charles.

Charles asks whether Everipedia could score any random article zero to a hundred for neutrality and quality, the same way stake pool participation gives Cardano a measurable decentralization score.

Kazemian agrees crypto coverage is stuck in the 'crypto middle ages,' barely acknowledging newer chains like Avalanche and Cardano despite the field now having credentialed researchers like Cornell professor Emin Gun Sirer.

Everipedia has no formal knowledge rating system yet, Kazemian says, though Larry Sanger explored the idea while at the company and continues it independently; the only current quality proxies are update speed and citation diversity versus Wikipedia.

Kazemian compares rating knowledge quality to the same subjectivity trap fact checkers like PolitiFact and Facebook fall into, since more stake proves participation but not truth; he notes anyone can also build a custom front end that filters to one topic, like an 'Elephantpedia.'.

Charles asks how Everipedia handles metadata: tagging, discoverability, and whether niche topics surface even without explicit tags.

Everipedia's tagging is deliberately basic and open to any editor, Kazemian says, since the protocol stays as unopinionated as Bitcoin and leaves discovery and display logic to front ends, including some in China that pull the content differently.

Article state and tags are hashed on chain per revision, Kazemian confirms, so the full tagging history is preserved right alongside the content history.

Charles notes Cardano's own Wikipedia saga saw German, Dutch and Japanese pages already judged notable while the English page was not, and asks how Everipedia handles equivalent quality across languages.

Everipedia is especially popular in places where Wikipedia access is restricted or unreliable, Kazemian says, citing Turkey and China alongside strong German, Korean and Chinese communities.

Kazemian's stated goal is 'one object, one topic': unlike Wikipedia's disjointed per language articles linked only loosely through Wikidata, Everipedia wants a single synthesized topic that can branch into colored language versions.

Everipedia is active on Twitter and Telegram, editing starts at everipedia.org signing in with Twitter, email, Facebook or an EOS wallet, and Kazemian is open to an Ethereum layer 2 build or closer ties with the Cardano community.