David & Barbara Mikkelson Found Urban Legends Reference Pages, One of the First Online Fact-Checking Websites

In 1994 David and Barbara Mikkelson created Urban Legends Reference Pages, an urban folklore website that was later renamed Snopes.com. The site was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends that mainly published search results of user discussions. It predated users' ability to check facts by search engine search results. The site continues to be a primary resource for sorting out between truth and falsehood, fact and gossip, and for understanding the history and evolution of urban legends that become widely believed. 

"David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner)^[10][11] as a username in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban." 

"Mikkelson has stressed the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages, indicating that their intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well.^[27] Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" when there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim.^[28]

"In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on the Internet as authority, Snopes assembled a series of fabricated urban folklore tales that it terms "The Repository of Lost Legends".^[29] The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L., a reference to the early 1990s definition of the word troll, meaning an Internet prank or an Internet persona intended to be deliberately provocative or incendiary.^{[12] (Wikipedia article on Snopes, accessed 8-2019).}