Interpedia was initiated by Rick Gates (born October 18, 1956), an
Internet pioneer who studied at the Graduate Library School at the
University of Arizona and who had previously created
The Internet Hunt. Gates posted a message titled "The Internet Encyclopedia" on October 25, 1993, to the PACS-L (Public-Access Computer Systems Forum)
Listserv. That message included the following musings: In November 1993, discussions moved to a dedicated
mailing list, supplemented later by
Usenet newsgroup . Several independent "Seal-of-approval" (SOAP) agencies were envisioned which would rate Interpedia articles based on criteria of their own choosing; users could then decide which agencies' recommendations to follow. The project was actively discussed for around half a year, but never left the planning stages, perhaps partly due to the unprecedented growth of the
World Wide Web. In 1995, Gates moved to
Oregon, where he founded Net Assets, a Web-based software and Internet training company, and taught as an adjunct professor at a distance for the University of Arizona School of Information Resources & Library Science and the
Rochester Institute of Technology through the late 1990s. He retired from Net Assets in 2005. ==See also==