Everything2 (1999- ), also called E2, is a sort of online, English-language writing club that anyone can join. It is at everything2.com.
Like the Wikipedia, it has many encyclopedia-style articles written by users, but there are important differences:
- Everything2 allows all forms of writing – essays, poetry, fiction, journal entries, etc.
- It has editors and a voting system that drives off bad writing and rewards the good.
- It has no Neutral Point of View policy. Writers can take strong points of view.
- Every piece of writing has only one author.
In short, Everything2 has gone for quality over quantity. It is much smaller than the Wikipedia and is more likely to have little or nothing on a given subject. But what it does have is written far better and therefore is more understandable and more enjoyable to read.
The Wikipedia went for quantity, becoming so big and important to the Internet that now there are enough moneyed interests who do not want to see it fail. Everything2, meanwhile, depends on the kindness of universities with spare computers.
The writing is better on Everything2 not just because of the editors and voting, but also because any given piece of writing is written by one person and can be written from a strong point of view. The writing therefore tends to be more forceful and hangs together better.
Where the Wikipedia will have one big, mishmashy article on a given subject written and edited by many hands, Everything2 will have several articles, each one written by a different author.
Voting is weighted. You cannot vote at all until you have at least ten of your own pieces live on the website. The most successful writers can vote a piece onto the front page. You can vote a piece up or down. Editors use voting to find the bad writing, which they either remove or make suggestions to the author on how to make it better.
Editors remove any writing that cannot stand on its own and be read independently. This limits flame wars.
The see-also links at the bottom of most pages are one of the best things about Everything2. Some of them are not directly related to what you just read but would probably interest you anyway.
Everything2’s writers seem to be mostly American, white, male, middle-class and left-wing, much more so than the Wikipedia’s. And way geekier too: Richard Stallman, famous in hacker circles, is referred to simply as “RMS”, while Beyonce does not even rate an article (though, to their credit, Lauryn Hill does). There are no articles on either T-Pain or Nia Long.
I have never written for Everything2: a blog gives me way more control and, besides, I get live comments, not faceless votes. Blogs arose at the same time as Everything2.
Everything2 was created by the same people who brought us Slashdot, a news website for computer geeks. But where Slashdot was bought and went on to greater glory, Everything2 has had trouble just staying online.
See also:
I am a huge fan of storytellers. Anything with a good pace and several soft climaxes leading to a big finish. The drier the wit and the more irony the better.
I just read an entry about a guy’s first and last date with a vegan of exceptional virtue, or so it seemed. He related the feeling of “get over yourself” very well. AND ITS A SERIES!!
Thanks for the resource.
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Thanks Abagond for this new media outlet. I have taken writing classes, paid for books, and tried to join writing groups to improve my writing, but I am having a hard time improving. What advice do you have for poor writers. My nemesis has to be punctuation.
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I have to check out this Everything2, just to rate it.
What I fear is what is their idea of good writing, how can one be objective? Is good writing entertaining, or educational? Or is good writing based on good grammer and the MLA rules?
Often, I write in a dialect in order to get across certain subtleties of what Im trying to express. And because it’s my primary language. Or I will blend AAVE (African Amer Vernacular English) with Standard English, like a patois. That’s my way of speaking.
And often I start sentences with conjunctions. This is just my way of showing that my new thought is connected to the previous thought even though it’s different. It’s the way I express what I’m talking about. Must I speak only in standard english when I don’t think in standard english? Im just sayin’.
I love the freedom of writing a blog, as I don’t think my style of writing would see the light of day, even on Everything2. But I will check them out!
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I am already sign up there. Great web page.
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@ Michaela:
By far the best way to improve your writing is to read and write regularly, the more the better. Here is a post that helped me:
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Thank you for the fair description and free publicity. Being the one who runs the circus in question, I’ll just (belatedly) note a couple of points where you’re off on the voting system and respond to some comments:
Voting is impersonal and not weighted in any way. All users with ten or more live writeups/articles have at least fifty votes a day to spend as they please, and all votes are equal. Specials marks of approval, which we dub C! (for “cool!”), are available to more experienced users. These are signed but, while their point score is the same, their value is subjective and depends on the prestige of the giver and on the relative frequency with which the giver awards them.
That said, more feedback-oriented voting and comments are high on our wishlist and will be added as soon as is practical. As a volunteer-run site, we can ask only so much of the few fine ladies and gents who devote their time to the thankless task of improving our spaghetti code and (still) somewhat arcane interface.
Our userbase is indeed dominated by thirty-ish white American males, though our actual age range is very broad and a good third of our users hail from other English-speaking countries, especially the UK. Perhaps a quarter of regular contributors, including many of our star writers, are women. We’re always pleased to have more show up if they’ll make an allowance for the residual geek culture that inevitably afflicts a site that began its life in the Slashdot menagerie.
We have no overt cultural bias. I, quite honestly, have not the faintest idea what most of our users’ background is (my own is rather colourful) and whether some of our most brilliant writers are white, black, or purple with pink stripes unless they’ve made it clear in their writing or in the course of their community participation. As far as I can tell most of our users who don’t subscribe to a “white” Anglo identity, whatever that may mean, are Asian-American or UK South Asian, with a smattering of continental Europeans and black Americans. Still, we admittedly probably have more of any of those groups than we have social conservatives. Our expression of diversity is probably more concentrated in the lifestyle/sexual orientation department. Again, not that we ask anyone the question but I’ve met enough of our writers to state that, on the whole, the E2 userbase is about as straight as your average banana.
Beyonce, T-Pain, Nia Long? Well, come write about them. I find it important that articles be written by people who feel not just knowledgeable but connected to the subject, and who will write them if not the sort of person who would note the absence of an article? NPOV be damned. Stylistic peculiarities like patois and odd grammatical constructs? You’ll get as many arguments about it here as you will anywhere but the bottom line is that you’re entitled to your style as a writer, whether our audience approves of it or not. The only writers we have no patience with are the stuck-up who think that having their name in print makes them better than the rest of us. Our number does include professional and semi-pro writers but on this site we are proudly amateur in what we do. And that’s in the true sense of the word–It’s for the love of the thing.
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I just went to the Everyting2.com blog. I read an entry call Satan sucks it was hilarious. I feel like I’ve been doing stomach crunches from laughing so hard. Too funny.
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