AUTOPEDIA® - THE FIRST ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Wikipedia: "An encyclopedia (also spelled encyclopaedia or encyclopædia) is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge."

• The domain "www.autopedia.com" was registered on October 2, 1995.


• AutoPedia^® - the Automotive Encyclopedia went online in November, 1995.
  The earliest independent third-party documentation of AutoPedia^® online is found in Archive.org's "Wayback Machine" - with a date of October 29, 1996. Although when you click on the October 29, 1996 archive link and then click on the "Honored Guest Registry" and the "Tire BBS", there are entries from users dating from June 12, 1996.

The Wikipedia discussion of online encyclopedias is limited to "free wiki-type academic encyclopedias created by users" and mentions various projects including these:

"The concept of a new free encyclopedia began with the Interpedia proposal on Usenet in 1993, which outlined an Internet-based online encyclopedia to which anyone could submit content and that would be freely accessible. Early projects in this vein included Everything2 and Open Site. In 1999, Richard Stallman proposed the GNUPedia, an online encyclopedia which, similar to the GNU operating system, would be a "generic" resource. The concept was very similar to Interpedia, but more in line with Stallman's GNU philosophy."

AutoPedia^® on the other hand, is a "collaborative consumer encyclopedia" providing consumers with faster, easier access to the information, products and services they want. Think of it as the "commercial encyclopedia" that assists the Internet users who are seeking information in order to do a transaction.

The following "pedia" listing shows the domain registration date (listed first) and the oldest listing in Archive.org's Wayback Machine (listed second in parenthesis):

• ENCYBERPEDIA.COM - June 25, 1996 (10/24/97)
• WINE-ENCYCLOPEDIA.COM - September 4, 1996 (12/23/96)
• GEOPEDIA.COM - October 9, 1996 (12/6/1998)
• INFOPEDIA.com - October 25, 1996 (12/22/1996)
• ATLAPEDIA.COM - November 5, 1996 (7/14/1997)
• ELEKTRAPEDIA.COM - December 12, 1996 (2/20/2000)
• EVERYTHING2.com - August 23, 1999 (2/29/2000)
• WORLDBOOKONLINE.COM - April, 15, 1999 (11/11/1999)
• NUPEDIA.com - October 29, 1999 (3/4/2000)
• OPENSITE.ORG - January 28, 2000 (3/1/2003)
• GNUPEDIA.com - February 10, 2000 (5/19/2001)
• WIKIPEDIA.com - January 12, 2001 (3/31/2001)


• WORLDBOOK.COM - April 20, 1995 (12/23/1996) - This site was created to sell the printed version of World Book Encyclopedia and was not the online version, which came four years later in April, 1999.

Although there unsubstantiated claims of "discussing," "coining," and "planning" various PEDIA suffix sites as early as 1990, the independent records of the dates of domain registration and the date of the actual website being online and indexed by Archive.org's Wayback Machine are documented above.

Even the most conservative AutoPedia^® date from Archive.org's Wayback Machine taken from the Guest Registry or Tire BBS, is BEFORE the domain registration date of any other PEDIA site.