Everything2 (styled Everything2 or E2 for short) is a collaborative online community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material.

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.

E2 was privately owned by the Blockstackers Intergalactic company,[4] but does not make a profit and is viewed by its long-term users as a collaborative work-in-progress.

As of January 23, 2012, it was announced that the site had been sold to long-time user and coder Jay Bonci under the name Everything2 Media LLC.

This, plus the predominantly "geek" membership back then and the lack of chat facilities, meant the early work was often of poor quality and was filled with self-referential humor.

As E2 has expanded, stricter quality standards have developed, much of the old material has been removed, and the membership has become broader in interest, although smaller in number.

Information science scholar Cliff Lampe ascribes this to a combination of factors including "editorial issues" and Everything2's launch before the dot-com crash.

The copyright in a writeup rests with the author, and no agreement to any kind of license is entered into by writing on E2 (except for giving the site permission to publish).

Users may earn experience points ("XP"), which count strictly toward level progress, or convertible currency ("GP"), which may be used to purchase lesser, temporary privileges.

A positive vote grants the writeup's author one experience point while also having a roughly ⅓ chance of giving one GP to the voter.

Writeups deleted before March 2011 are visible to the author on a legacy page called "Node Heaven"; newer or more recently removed items become drafts.

The site's administrators used to have the ability to "borg"—prevent from using the Chatterbox or message system—those users whose behavior violated the unwritten standards of politeness and decorum.

The main use for the message system is giving constructive criticism to the author of a writeup; however, it can be and is used like any medium of private communication.

Heavy use of external URLs is discouraged as E2 content is expected to stand on its own within a largely self-supportive infrastructure.

Rolling over the phrase with the mouse (e.g. "online encyclopedias") shows the hidden content (in this case, "Wikipedia") as the link's title.

These are two-way links intended to approximate "thought processes," similar in concept to Jason Rohrer's tangle proxy.

[12] A 2001 column in The Japan Times called E2 "awe-inspiring in its expansiveness and depth" and "a Sim City of knowledge management".

Internet Life, Jon Katz cited Everything2 alongside Plastic.com and The Vines Network as an example of "a revolutionary change in media" in 2001.

[14] A 2005 Washington Post op-ed by university student Claude Willan discussed Everything2 in the context of twentysomething Millennial disaffection.

[15] The column began by discussing Borf as a subversive collective identity for culture jamming activities, and used Borf's co-opting into an anonymous collective body as a launching point for a meditation on the Millennial generation's sense that modern society's "images don't relate to us" and "all we can do to make ourselves heard is to twist these images back on themselves."

Willan gave the "collectivist writing project Everything2.com" as an example of this phenomenon: "run by people you may never meet or talk to, and who specialize in creating fiction or journalism."

They draw a contrast between Everything2's XP-driven attention economy encouraging "eccentric or provocative subjects" and Wikipedia's "purely egalitarian" precedent where all visitors can edit articles and "all entries are at the same level"; they also contrast Slashdot's conversational writing that links to external news with Everything2's crafted writing that usually links internally to other Everything2 writeups, which fosters "a focused, if inbred, community.

[20]: 80-81 In his study of reputation systems as providers of socializing functions and tools for organizing online communities, Cliff Lampe describes Everything2 as "a compelling example of sociotechnical interactions."

[21] Everything2 responded by revising its reputation system to favor user ratings of writeups over the number of write-ups posted.