everything2

Early (~1998) wiki from [Blockstackers], the creators of the [Slashdot] tech blog ("News for Nerds: Stuff that Matters"), that started as an experimental "what can this be used for?" [Perl] skunkworks, for a time was used as an ad hoc glossary of Slashdot terms, and which consequently evolved into (what was the phrase) a weird headless death cult of writer apostles. Following in the path of Borges' Library of Babel, it strove to include everything both true and imaginary as well as all the grey area in-between, yielding an enormous quantity of half-baked encyclopedia-esque micro-essays on every subject imaginable, springing from a fecund site culture of feverish millennials on office job coffee breaks, producing along the way an incredible array of incomprehensible-to-outsiders jargon and memes (nodegel, soy, Everything Death Borg, Brian Eno...?!) Following three or four good years of parties and marriages, a cadre of volunteer editors decided it was time for Everything to pivot hard to being a clean-nosed community for aspiring professional writers and powerfully with the chaos of freedom gone, an implied asterisk imposed after the site's name, suddenly the party was over, though somehow the site staggers on even today. At its launch it was the id to Wikipedia's superego (in the early days they really were fellow contenders in the same emerging field!), but following the pivot it lost even that distinction. The secret to the Inspector Dangerfuck webcomics claim mystery Kirkman investigated in Dec 2025 lies somewhere in its node heaven, and may never be brought to light.

Its initial version (as simply "Everything") allowed for two 512-character write-ups to be written on any topic, after which nothing further could be added except as a soft link. Other articles that hypertext-referenced that topic (in "hard links" enclosed in hard brackets) or unlinked nodes that organically drove traffic there would appear in a table of "soft links" at the bottom of the write-ups, with more frequently-trafficked sources appearing higher in the sequence. (Soft links were intended to provide loose connection to related topics, but in practice found themselves being used as meta-commentary in a way that anticipated the emergence of reactji. This may be e2's one great innovation.) The Everything2 expansion removed the Twitter-like character limit (and with it, any aspiration to minimalist elegance in its prose) and the write-up limit per node. Cthulu found his way to Everything following the collapse of Mist Classic, seeking some kind of crossroads between nerdy and literary pursuits, and for a time as "Pseudo_Intellectual" was its most prolific contributor (... though populating this wiki currently sure is scratching the same itch!) There wasn't a lot of e2 in the Mist revival, but there was a bit of it. The site's community was the subject of Cthulu's final major tracker music composition, constituted of samples of users' ("Everythingians") voices left in a voice mail box.

www.everything2.com