Rick Gates (Internet pioneer)
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Rick Gates (born October 18, 1956) is an Internet pioneer mostly known because he organised 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 the World Wide Web became more popular, the competition was closed in October 1994.
On October 22, 1993, Gates 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. The original proposal was made by Rick Gates in the posting Internet AS Encyclopedia on October 31, 1993 of Douglas P. Wilson in alt.bbs.internet.[1]
In 1995, Rick Gates moved to Oregon where he worked on developing a Web-based software company, Net Assets. Rick was also employed as an adjunct professor, teaching at a distance for the University of Arizona School of Information Resources & Library Science and the Rochester Institute of Technology through the late 1990s. In 2005, he retired from Net Assets. He currently lives in Eugene, Oregon.