I spent a week arguing with my husband over E2 before he ever set eyes on it.

His major gripe was with the idea that writeups and nodes can be removed, and that everyone in the community has a power to contribute to that by downvoting. He sees that as a form of censorship by which legitimate (read - any ole') information gets lost.

Personally, that smacks of libertarianism to me. I emphatically disagree with the notion that everything - including snuff movies and child pornography - has a right to propagate itself on the internet. That just doesn't work for me, sorry. There have to be limits, and limits self-imposed by the community where the writers are also the readers strike me as a good compromise between complete anarchy and strict censorship.

Perhaps it's because of being a Dreamy Girlie, but I would not want any of my non-internet friends to see E2, or to know of its existence.

E2 is where I let all my defences down. It's where I show my "me-ness". It's where I have no pretences and no politenesses and none of that careful feeling my way I tend to need when interacting with "real life people"

Once I had been on E2 for a week, I wished I had chosen a nick that did not make me so easily recognisable, just on case someone who knows me blunders across E2 one day. 

Some internet based friends know of E2, and of my involvement with it. A couple have even read some of my nodes. But none of them knows me in RL, and so the privacy problem doesn't happen.

So I'll never know what my non-everythingian friends think of E2, cos I'll keep hiding it from them.

When I try to explain this place to other people I always introduce it as a user built encyclopaedia. What drew me to everything2 at first was the chance to help to create a reference for the future. I always hated normal encyclopaedias because you can’t add or change anything in them even if you think it is completely wrong, here you can vote and write and frankly, I think everything2 is a better reference than Britannica since I can find out who wrote an entry and their opinions on other topics thus placing the write up in context. Everything2 is postmodern in this sense and I hope to see it become more user friendly so that in the future it might become the first place people look when do research on any topic.

Even when I say all that my friends say “wow that's cool/amazing but it’s way too much work . . .We’ll leave it to you.” (Philistines)

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