After years of lurking around, I finally signed up for an account on Everything2. So far, I'm having a great time with the site.
But one day in the catbox (to non-noders: chatbox) a very well-established noder posted that Everything2's real problem is that none of its users know what it is. Is this true? Perhaps. It would be folly to say that E2 is a simple place. But I'm going to try and give my idea of what it is.
E2 is people.
This might seem like a really boring conclusion to arrive at. It may seem wrong, it may seem right, it may seem weird. Nonetheless, I feel that is the best description anyone can give of E2.
The site itself is essentially a giant wiki-style compendium of users' writeups: short pieces of fiction, or non-fiction, or part-fiction. But unlike Wikipedia, E2 isn't about giving out information. It's not about a particular topic. As the name implies--and I do believe the name is accurate in this regard--E2 is about everything.
The problem is that a new user might assume that because the site is about everything, he can write anything. Under this assumption, people who have joined the site have gotten rather annoyed by its manner. E2 is not Wikipedia. It does not pretend to be, and I think that (except perhaps for a very small minority) its users do not want it to be. On Wikipedia, if you can find something and it's in some way important to something, you can write about it. Your writing will stick around until someone decides that it's flawed in some way, but even then, much of your original work will live on in places.
E2 is not like that. E2 is like the real world. Granted, Wikipedia has analogues in the real world too: World Book, Brittanica, et. al. But the real world doesn't cart them around and show them off. They are reference materials. E2, on the other hand, is really just trying to capture the best of the real world.
A day or so after I joined the site properly, I came across this writeup. It's true, and better than all of the the other writeups in that node, it is inspiring. E2 is like walking into a conversation that's been going on longer than just about any of the participants can remember. Even a simple conversation like that has its own culture, its own code, its own wonderful little inside jokes. But for whatever reason, so stuck your head in the door, and now you can choose something. You can talk, you can watch, or you can leave. Same as everything everywhere.
That's where the name comes from. Everything2 is not about having everything; it's about working the same way as everything. It's something that is really hard to find out there, even on the Internet. I'm glad that E2 works like this, and I hope it stays this way.
But if it doesn't, c'est la vis, and such is everything