Interpedia

Interpedia is the chronologically first Internet encyclopedia that allowed anyone to write articles and add them to the central directory of all pages.

The founder of Interpedia was Rick Gates, who announced on October 22, 1993:

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that such a resource containing general encyclopedic knowledge would become an important object for research and for the entire network community as a whole. .. Speaking about the participants ... where can I find authors to write the necessary articles? Well, I would first of all start the method of communication with a wide range of people ... from linguists to molecular biologists ... And the Network provides just such an audience! So I seriously considered it ... ... and came to the conclusion that this is a good idea!

The term Interpedia was coined by R. L. Samuel, who participated in the first discussions on this topic.

The discussion was initially held in the mailing list , and in November 1993, a newsgroup comp.infosystems.interpedia was created on Usenet (see [1] ).

There was some disagreement over what the pages should be - HTML , plain text, or all formats should be allowed (e.g. Gopher ). Another important point of discussion was the question of including materials from other Internet resources directly in the Interpedia catalog.

In the end, the project never left the planning stage and ceased to exist during the explosive leap of the World Wide Web .