E2 users called noders create pages called nodes and add information in multiple writeups. Only logged-in users can create writeups, and only the author of a writeup or an editor appointed by the site administrators can edit a writeup.
There are other types of nodes that do not contain writeups; for instance, the administrators can create "superdoc" nodes such as Everything New Nodes and Page of Cool that allow interaction, and each user has a "homenode" where she can add a short autobiography or other text.
Links. Hard links in E2 are similar to free links in this wiki, except surrounded by single square brackets rather than double square brackets. E2 writeups cannot link outside of E2; to reference an external URL, a noder simply includes it in the writeup as plain text.
At the bottom of every node, the system displays a rectangular grid of 24 soft links. These are created by the system as follows: whenever a logged-in user moves from one node with writeups to another, be it through a hard link, another soft link, or through the title search box, the system records the node the user originated from; the soft links are links back to the most common such originating nodes.
Rewards. The administrators loosely based E2's reward system on role-playing video games. Every time a user creates a writeup, she earns one experience point. Users with at least 25 contributed writeups and 50 experience points can vote + or - on a writeup, which has a 1/3 chance of giving or taking an experience point from the author depending on the direction of the vote and a 1/5 chance of giving a point to the voter; after voting on a writeup, a noder can see the writeup's "reputation," or number of positive and negative votes. (The editors delete writeups that have earned significantly more negative votes than positive. Most of the time, losing a writeup has no ill effect on an author's XP, but in the case of an extremely poor writeup, an editor has the option to take 5 XP from an author.) The system grants special powers at other levels of writeups and experience, such as "cool" (reward author with three XP and send the writeup to the front page), the ability to create primitive [chat room]?s on the site, and space for uploading a picture to a user's "homenode."
E2 is not Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, E2 encourages discussion within nodes and tolerates heavy bias; in fact, some E2 users often think of more neutral efforts such as Wikipedia as "sterile." In the words of an administrator who goes by the name [wharfinger]:
While Wikipedia attempts to attract traffic by aiming for prominent listings with search engines, E2 nodes are not indexed by search engine spiders and are largely invisible to the world outside Everything2.
Moving content between E2 and Wikipedia You are free to take content you have written on E2 and move it to Wikipedia. Please render it from a neutral point of view, informative, and encyclopedic (see the perfect article for pointers). You cannot take content written by somebody else without permission because E2 does not require that authors license content under the GNU Free Documentation License, but if you have an E2 account, you can contact the author through the site's private message system, and the author will often be glad to give permission. It's probably much better to ask the author to add the content him- or herself, to avoid any possible copyright questions; otherwise, it seems you'd probably have to post here a copy of the permission e-mail. You are free to take content from Wikipedia and copy it to E2, but E2 discourages "cut-and-paste noding" of somebody else's work, so do this only if you wrote much of the Wikipedia entry. Moreover, you must include attribution information per the GNU FDL that Wikipedia uses.
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