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Sat Apr 14 2001 at 23:28:51 (23.5 years ago )
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Photo: a Magnet Mushroom.

Welcome

If you are new to Everything2, welcome to a great big database of writing about people, places, things and ideas; a sprawling collection of facts and stories from the heads of a couple of thousand or so different people, all connected by the magic of the soft link. Soft links are the links collected at the bottom of each node (subject heading); they are created at whim by users using the search box and following hard links, the links within writeups - some of which hide further meaning, revealed to those who hover their mouse over them (or whatever might be your chosen equivalent for navigating links). The relevance of soft links varies widely - they are often created absent-mindedly; but mostly they're not, and the way they make it so easy for anyone to make a public link between two ideas is one of the strokes of genius behind Everything2. I am an editor here (and an admin-coder), and I am willing to answer any questions you have about the site, and to give feedback on writing you might like to submit.

If you're thinking of writing something here, I strongly recommend you read E2 Quick Start and have a look over Everything2 Help to see what else there is; if you're just wanting to read stuff, there are several ways of seeking out good writing besides just looking things up using the searchbox, or clicking random links. First off, look in the Cool Archive (user picks) and the Page of Cool (editor selections); anything there that sounds like it might be interesting probably is. If you find something you like, go to the home node of the author (or 'profile' as such things are universally known in 2012) by clicking on their name at the top of the writeup, and then click 'View Username's Writeups'. If you're interested in a particular area, it is worth looking at the following indexes of various topics.

See also Everything Quests and Usergroup Picks for other sorts of lists of writeups on particular topics.

Each 'metanode' usually has one person in overall control of it, but in many cases the burden of maintaining them is shared by a usergroup so that they don't stop being updated if their original creator doesn't have time to look after them. The extensive Cookery catalogue is controlled by the recipe group, with individual maintainers assigned to most of its sections, for instance; the control of Everything Religion is currently being delegated via the e2religion group. The Scientists nodes and Physics and Astronomy are looked after by E2science, the site's science writing group, of which I am the official leader; any suggestions for the latter two should be addressed to me.

Besides working on indexes of the site's science coverage, the group exists to encourage the writing of readable science here; see the E2 Science node for more on what it's about, or E2_science for the short version; see E2science for science writeups selected to appear there by members, and a list of those members. Let me know if you want to join.

I've been looking around and it's dawned on me that in spite of the presence the occasional great work like dannye on Blonde on Blonde and riverrun on Love and Theft, and Freddo's body of very solid album writeups, the proportion of Dylan's albums which have been noded properly is scandalously small. (but not as small as it was when I first wrote that. Thank you.)

People! Get to it! This here list of inadequately noded Dylan albums is a potential cool-mine:

I have included the ones from his Christian Rock period, although I have yet to meet anyone who likes many of the songs on them. Albums with a question mark probably have about one paragraph of actual content on them. I expect I'll get to some more eventually myself... apologies if this list is out of date by the way, It's possible I may have missed some since I first compiled it.

Speaking of records which somebody really ought to node properly, why has nobody done these Tori Amos albums justice yet? For shame!