Chris Richmond

The Snopes.com website was founded by David Mikkelson, a project begun in 1994 as an expression of his interest in researching urban legends that have since grown into the oldest and largest fact-checking site on the Internet — one widely regarded by journalists, folklorists, and laypersons alike as one of the world’s essential resources.Snopes.com is routinely included in annual “Best of the Web” lists and has been the recipient of two Webby awards. Snopes.com personnel have made multiple appearances as guests on national news programs such as 20/20, ABC World News, CNN Sunday Morning, and NPR’s All Things Considered, and they and their work have been profiled in numerous major news publications, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Reader’s Digest.Over twenty years later, Snopes.com has come to be regarded as an online touchstone of research on rumors and misinformation. The site’s work has been described as painstaking, scholarly, and reliable, and has been lauded by the world’s top folklorists, including Jan Harold Brunvand, Gary Alan Fine, and Patricia Turner. Hundreds of the site’s articles have been cited by authors in a variety of disciplines, and various of their articles have been published in textbooks currently in use in the U.S. and Canadian school systems.