Interpedia was initiated by Rick Gates, who posted a message titled "The Internet Encyclopedia" on October 25, 1993 to the PACS-L (Public-Access Computer Systems Forum) Listserv.
Ahh.. but what about contributors... where will you find authors to write the short articles you need?
Well, I'd first have to start out by finding some way of communicating with an extremely diverse set of people... everyone from linguists, to molecular biologists, from animal rights activists to zymurgists, and from geographers to gas chromotographers.
In November 1993, discussions moved to a dedicated mailing list,[2] supplemented later by Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.interpedia.
[5] 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.