Everything2

Everything2 (styled Everything2 or E2 for short) is a collaborative online community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material. E2 is moderated for quality, but has no formal policy on subject matter. Writing on E2 covers a wide range of topics and genres, including encyclopedic articles, diary entries (known as "daylogs"), poetry, humor, and fiction. The predecessor of E2 was a similar database called Everything (later labeled "Everything1" or "E1") which was started around March 1998 by Nathan Oostendorp and was initially closely aligned with and promoted by the technology-related news website Slashdot (by virtue of various key principals having attended the Holland Christian High School), even sharing (at the time) some administrators. The Everything2 software offered vastly more features, and the Everything1 data was twice incorporated into E2: once on November 13, 1999, and again in January 2000. The Everything2 server used to be colocated with the Slashdot servers. However, some time after OSDN acquired Slashdot, and moved the Slashdot servers, this hosting was terminated on short notice. This resulted in Everything2 being offline from roughly November 6 to December 9, 2003. Everything2 was then hosted by the University of Michigan for a time. As the Everything2 site put it on October 2, 2006: Now, we have an arrangement with the University of Michigan, located in Ann Arbor. We exist thanks to their generosity (which is motivated by their academic curiosity, I suppose). They gave us some servers and act as our ISP, free of charge, and all they ask in exchange is that we not display advertisements. The Everything2 servers were moved to the nearby Michigan State University in February 2007. E2 was privately owned by the Blockstackers Intergalactic company, but does not make a profit and is viewed by its long-term users as a collaborative work-in-progress. Until mid-2007 it accepted donations of money and, on occasion, of computer hardware but no longer does so.