Rick Gates

Rick Gates is an Internet pioneer mostly known because he organised the The Internet Hunt and raised the ideas of Interpedia. He studied at the Graduate Library School at the University of Arizona. In 1992 he started the monthly competition "The Internet Hunt" where questions had to be answered exclusively using sources on the Internet. Utilities of investigation were Usenet, FTP, Gopher and Telnet (NCSA Mosaic, the first popular Web browser was first published in April 1993). When World Wide Web became more popular, the competition was closed in October 1994.

On October 22, 1993, Gates presumably proposed in the Usenet newsgroup alt.internet.services to collaboratively create an encyclopaedia on the Internet. From this idea the Interpedia project evolved which is known as precursor to Wikipedia. Although the original posting is lost it is very likely that the original proposal was made by Rick Gates (see the posting "Internet AS Encyclopedia" on October 31, 1993 of Douglas P. Wilson in alt.bbs.internet [http://groups.google.de/group/alt.bbs.internet/msg/154a6a552ca631af?output=gplain&fwc=1] ).

In the 1990s Rick Gates taught at several schools in Oregon ( [http://lsa.uoregon.edu/lsa/formerstaff.html#gates] ) and at the University of Arizona School of Information Resources & Library Science ( [http://www.cwu.edu/~vargas/] and [http://www.sir.arizona.edu/alumni/ghi.htm] ). Today he lives in Eugene, Oregon.

References

* Tom Kozma: "The Internet Hunt". In: Information Technology News, February 1997 [http://www.wayne.edu/it_news/feb97/cyberlore.html]