Interpedia

Interpedia (Erusean: Interpédia) is a free, multilingual online encyclopedia that is openly collaborative and maintained by the Interpedia Foundation (Erusean: Fondation Interpédia) with substantial input from a vast community of volunteer contributors using the Pedia system of online website editing. It is the largest reference site on the internet and is commonly held up as the best and most well-known reference site on the internet, ranking as the 10th-most visited website in 2010.

History
Officially launched on the 16th of March, 1995, the website was created as a collaborative effort between Encyclopédie Élysées, Inc. and a consortium of museums worldwide to create a reference work dubbed the "Global Encyclopedia," freely accessible to anyone. An ongoing effort by its creators was made to both create new pages on all feasible subjects while also updating existing pages to keep pace with the rapid development of society, culture, and scientific knowledge. This proved popular almost immediately and website traffic steadily climbed through the early 2000s, but by 2005 the website was already reaching past its capacity and the sheer scale of pages being created and upkept was no longer possible to manage by a single organization.

In response to this, an experimental design of publicly-sourced volunteer work was created to effectively outsource the work to the wider public, allowing them to edit and create articles at their own leisure while also allowing them continued free access to the site without advertisements or subscription services. It was also at this time that it was rebranded as Interpedia and a new non-profit foundation was created to manage the site’s resources and assets, the Interpedia Foundation based in Usea.

This was met with controversy, as many predicted that the site would now be edited with heavy personal biases now that there was a much-reduced system of quality control. Others predicted that as the site grew more popular others would want to ensure the information was as correct as possible. In the end, the latter prediction came to be true, as the Interpedia Foundation also began to link to publicly-available studies to allow people to reference their edits and pages properly. With this new open-source editing, the site grew even more popular. However ongoing criticism of who writes the pages and uses which sources continues.

The website has also expanded some features of social networking primarily as a means of sharing and disseminating self-made or edited pages as a form of peer review. In 2010, the site continues to serve as many people's primary point of reference and information, to the point that it has effectively displaced many older institutions and reference works and to where many now jokingly call it the "Encyclopédie Galactique."