Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-64.237.235.118-20130825022534/@comment-1173941-20130926052602

Well yeah, haha... He wrote the Web Novel, starting in about 2002, when he entered SAO in some contest, but it exceeded the word count or something. So instead he put it up on his site. Eventually he submitted Accel World to the same contest, and when he won, he was apparently asked to publish SAO. His SAO work has sense been removed from his site, but you can easily find copies online. (untranslated of course)

The Light Novel made quite a few changes, though most are pretty much minor, story-wise (such as bumping all the years up by 10, lowering the amount of players trapped in SAO form 50k to 10k, changing a few details in certain scenes (Asuna killing Kuradeel, to Kirito killing Kuradeel), cutting the number of Integrity Knights in half, changing Ronie's and Teize's rape, into an attempted rape, and many more I'm sure I just don't know about. Heck, half of Volume 10 wasn't even in the Web Novel.) But the change that is apparent at the end of Volume 13 just completely strays away from what happened in the Web Novel...

But, when it comes to what's canon on this wiki, Light Novel comes first, as it is the canon that was published.