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{{short description|Historical Wikipedia documentation page}}
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[[File:UuU.png|thumb|right|The January 16, 2001 UuU article version seen with the [[mw:Skin:Nostalgia|Nostalgia skin]].]]

This page, originally in the [[Help:Namespace|main namespace]] as '''UuU''', contains what was the earliest surviving edit on the [[English Wikipedia]] (and hence any Wikipedia and project in the [[Wikimedia Foundation]]) prior to the importation of other earlier edits in 2019, which was made on January 16, 2001 at 20:08 UTC and can be found [https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:UuU&oldid=291430 here]. Earlier edits had been made to the English Wikipedia and were discovered in archives in 2010, but did not survive in page histories due to the unreliable nature of page histories kept by contemporaneous software.

Intended as a list of countries beginning with the letter "U", and particularly to add the [[United States]] to the list of countries, its odd title is a result of software considerations of the time. The page's creation survived due to the low activity on the page between its creation and the conversion of Wikipedia to software that kept page histories reliably. It was discovered as having Wikipedia's earliest surviving edit in 2004. As the author has waived copyright for all his contributions to Wikipedia, the 16 January 2001 revision is in the [[public domain]], the earliest Wikipedia article version completely so.

As of July 30, 2019, the current earliest surviving edit to the English Wikipedia is the first edit present in the Starling logs, the creation of [[HomePage]] made [https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=HomePage&oldid=908493298 here].

==Background==
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 as an offshoot of the encyclopedia [[Nupedia]]. It initially used the wiki engine [[UseModWiki]], which did not keep page histories reliably. At the time, preservation of page histories was seen as unimportant on wikis since such pages were considered to exist in the [[meatball:WikiNow|WikiNow]] and at times even contrary to the spirit of a wiki per [[meatball:ForgiveAndForget|ForgiveAndForget]].<ref>[[meatball:KeptPages|KeptPages]]</ref> UseModWiki used CamelCase to automatically create links to articles, a feature that had been inherited from Ward Cunningham's [[WikiWikiWeb]] and thereby ultimately from the programming language [[Smalltalk]].<ref>[[meatball:CamelCase|CamelCase]]</ref>

==Creation of the page==
[[File:UuU edit.png|thumb|The edit as it appears in the Starling archives. Notice the original camelcased form of "UnitedStates".]]
UuU was created on January 16, 2001 by [[User:Eiffel|Roger Browne]] under the name{{efn|name="Domains"|Domain names [[WP:USEMODDOMAIN|were treated like IP addresses]] by UseModWiki, so neither "office.bomis.com" nor "eiffel.demon.co.uk" were proper usernames. [[User:ScottMoonen|ScottMoonen]] would be the first true named user later on January 16.}} eiffel.demon.co.uk in the edit that survives to this day. It was the 11th page created on the English Wikipedia,{{efn|The first 10 were, in order, [[HomePage]], [[WikiPedia]], [[PhilosophyAndLogic]], [[UnitedStates]], [[PopularMusic]], [[SportS]], [[MathematicsAndStatistics]], [[CountriesOfTheWorld]], [[AaA]], and [[AfghanistaN]].<ref name=rc>Starling rclog</ref>}} and the first not created by [[User:office.bomis.com|office.bomis.com]].{{efn|name="Domains"}}<ref name=rc/> Browne had made the first non-[[Bomis]] edit to Wikipedia eight minutes earlier<ref name=rc/> by adding bullet points and [[orienteering]] to the list on the article [[SportS]].<ref name="Sports">{{cite news |author=eiffel.demon.co.uk |title=SportS |work=Starling diff_log |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=January 16, 2001}}</ref> Browne, a user of WikiWikiWeb, had earlier attempted to contribute to Nupedia but was turned down due to a lack of formal qualification that Nupedia expected of its contributors.<ref name="Background">{{cite web |author=Eiffel |title=User talk:Eiffel |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Eiffel&diff=prev&oldid=740956284 |website=Wikipedia |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=September 24, 2016 |accessdate=July 21, 2019}}</ref>

The article was intended to help fill out an alphabetical list of countries. Recalling the article's creation Browne explained further:

{{quotation|Someone had already set up some categories (taken from Nupedia I think), one of which was 'Countries' and included unlinked entries for the letters A-Z. Someone had created a stub for [[United_States]], so I added it to the index.|Roger Browne|3=UuU Talk page<span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:Wikipedia talk:UuU|diff=33037602&oldid=25066337}}]</span>}}

The title was a [[Wikipedia:CamelCase|CamelCase]] hack to create a link to an article that would otherwise be named '[[U]]'.<ref name="Lih">Lih p. 64</ref> Such an article name was impossible due to CamelCased rather than double-bracketed phrases (so-called "free links") serving as article links, making the shortest possible article name three letters long: a capital letter, followed by at least one lowercase letter, followed by at least one capital letter.<ref name="Lih">Lih p. 64</ref>

The [[wikitext]] of the page's first version as given by the [[Nost:Wikipedia:General disclaimer|Nostalgia Wikipedia]] is:

<pre>
* UnitedKingdom
* [[United States]]
* Uruguay
</pre>

The second line was originally "* UnitedStates" without brackets,<ref name="edit">{{cite news |author=eiffel.demon.co.uk |title=UuU |work=Starling diff_log |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=January 16, 2001}}</ref> but was converted by a UseModWiki script into a free link later in 2001.

==Subsequent history==
Listing countries using this method was soon deprecated; the page [[CountriesU]] was created on January 21,<ref name=rc/> and on February 6 [[Jimmy Wales]] noted that use of the similar page [[AaA]] was "now discouraged".<ref name="AaA">{{cite web |author=JimboWales |title=AaA |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=AaA&oldid=233181 |website=Wikipedia |date=February 6, 2001 |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |accessdate=July 21, 2019}}</ref> By April 2001 the alphabetical lists of countries had been merged into one article that is now known as [[List of sovereign states]].

Wikipedia started supporting and encouraging free links in late February 2001. At that time a script was designed that converted all pre-existing CamelCase links to the new format, including the "UnitedStates" link on this page. The "UnitedKingdom" was unaffected since it was not at the time an article. This conversion was not recorded as an edit on the pages on which it was performed. Support of CamelCase links was dropped with the introduction of [[Wikipedia:Phase II software|Phase II software]] in January 2002, although almost all such links had already been removed by then.

The first UuU edit survived because {{diff|WP:UuU|385544927|291430|the page only received one edit}} between the time that it was created and Wikipedia's conversion to the Phase II software. That edit was in May 2001 and turned the page into a redirect to [[U]], where it remained until it was discovered as containing Wikipedia's earliest surviving edit in 2004. It was {{diff|WP:UuU|48604813|label=moved to the Wikipedia namespace}} in 2006. Browne has not edited the page since its creation; he has deeded all his contributions to Wikipedia, including the initial revisions of this page, into the public domain.

In December 2010, earlier archives were [[mailarchive:foundation-l/2010-December/063088.html|discovered]] by [[Tim Starling]], though many of these edits are not present in Wikipedia page histories. The earliest edit found in these archives was made to {{no redirect|HomePage}}, which read "This is the new WikiPedia!",<ref name="HomePage">{{cite news |author=office.bomis.com |title=HomePage |work=Starling diff_log |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=January 15, 2001}}</ref> while the first article{{efn|The Main Page is not considered an article.}} created was [[WikiPedia]].{{efn|In December 2008, Jimmy Wales claimed to have made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "[[Hello world program|Hello, World!]]", but no such edit appears in Starling's archives, and Starling himself has speculated that the edit might have been made on a test wiki from January 10 that was later deleted.<ref name="Testwiki">{{cite web |last1=Starling |first1=Tim |authorlink=Tim Starling |title="Hello world?" |url=https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-January/108198.html |date=January 14, 2011 |website=WikiEN-l |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |accessdate=July 19, 2019}}</ref> Upon being notified of the newly-imported HomePage edits on his talk page in 2019, Wales [[Special:Diff/910624256|retold this story]], claiming that he deleted a lot of stuff "on the hard drive" to explain the absence of the edit.}}<ref name=rc/>

== See also ==
* [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles|Wikipedia's oldest articles]]
* [[Wikipedia:First 100 pages]]
* [[History of Wikipedia]]
*[//nostalgia.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=UuU&oldid=50893 The static version of the original UuU edit from the Nostalgia Wikipedia]
:*[https://reagle.org/joseph/2010/wp/redux/UuU/979675713.html And as it appears on Joseph Reagle's 10K Redux]
*Browne would use the eiffel.demon.co.uk domain until January 18, 2001, making a total of 22 edits. These edits are inaccessible through [[Special:Contributions]] due to [[Bugzilla:323|bug 323]], which prevents edits from usernames that start with a lower-case letter from appearing in Special:Contributions. (Lists of early edits affected by this bug are at [[User:Nemo bis/Bug 323 revisions]]).

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

== References==
{{reflist}}

== Bibliography ==
*{{cite book
|title=The Wikipedia REVOLUTION: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
|last=Lih
|first=Andrew
|year=2009
|publisher=Hyperion
|location=New York, New York
|isbn=978-1-4013-0371-6
}}


[[Category:Wikipedia history]]

Revision as of 01:35, 5 August 2020

The January 16, 2001 UuU article version seen with the Nostalgia skin.

This page, originally in the main namespace as UuU, contains what was the earliest surviving edit on the English Wikipedia (and hence any Wikipedia and project in the Wikimedia Foundation) prior to the importation of other earlier edits in 2019, which was made on January 16, 2001 at 20:08 UTC and can be found here. Earlier edits had been made to the English Wikipedia and were discovered in archives in 2010, but did not survive in page histories due to the unreliable nature of page histories kept by contemporaneous software.

Intended as a list of countries beginning with the letter "U", and particularly to add the United States to the list of countries, its odd title is a result of software considerations of the time. The page's creation survived due to the low activity on the page between its creation and the conversion of Wikipedia to software that kept page histories reliably. It was discovered as having Wikipedia's earliest surviving edit in 2004. As the author has waived copyright for all his contributions to Wikipedia, the 16 January 2001 revision is in the public domain, the earliest Wikipedia article version completely so.

As of July 30, 2019, the current earliest surviving edit to the English Wikipedia is the first edit present in the Starling logs, the creation of HomePage made here.

Background

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 as an offshoot of the encyclopedia Nupedia. It initially used the wiki engine UseModWiki, which did not keep page histories reliably. At the time, preservation of page histories was seen as unimportant on wikis since such pages were considered to exist in the WikiNow and at times even contrary to the spirit of a wiki per ForgiveAndForget.[1] UseModWiki used CamelCase to automatically create links to articles, a feature that had been inherited from Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb and thereby ultimately from the programming language Smalltalk.[2]

Creation of the page

The edit as it appears in the Starling archives. Notice the original camelcased form of "UnitedStates".

UuU was created on January 16, 2001 by Roger Browne under the name[a] eiffel.demon.co.uk in the edit that survives to this day. It was the 11th page created on the English Wikipedia,[b] and the first not created by office.bomis.com.[a][3] Browne had made the first non-Bomis edit to Wikipedia eight minutes earlier[3] by adding bullet points and orienteering to the list on the article SportS.[4] Browne, a user of WikiWikiWeb, had earlier attempted to contribute to Nupedia but was turned down due to a lack of formal qualification that Nupedia expected of its contributors.[5]

The article was intended to help fill out an alphabetical list of countries. Recalling the article's creation Browne explained further:

Someone had already set up some categories (taken from Nupedia I think), one of which was 'Countries' and included unlinked entries for the letters A-Z. Someone had created a stub for United_States, so I added it to the index.

— Roger Browne, UuU Talk page[1]

The title was a CamelCase hack to create a link to an article that would otherwise be named 'U'.[6] Such an article name was impossible due to CamelCased rather than double-bracketed phrases (so-called "free links") serving as article links, making the shortest possible article name three letters long: a capital letter, followed by at least one lowercase letter, followed by at least one capital letter.[6]

The wikitext of the page's first version as given by the Nostalgia Wikipedia is:

* UnitedKingdom
* [[United States]]
* Uruguay

The second line was originally "* UnitedStates" without brackets,[7] but was converted by a UseModWiki script into a free link later in 2001.

Subsequent history

Listing countries using this method was soon deprecated; the page CountriesU was created on January 21,[3] and on February 6 Jimmy Wales noted that use of the similar page AaA was "now discouraged".[8] By April 2001 the alphabetical lists of countries had been merged into one article that is now known as List of sovereign states.

Wikipedia started supporting and encouraging free links in late February 2001. At that time a script was designed that converted all pre-existing CamelCase links to the new format, including the "UnitedStates" link on this page. The "UnitedKingdom" was unaffected since it was not at the time an article. This conversion was not recorded as an edit on the pages on which it was performed. Support of CamelCase links was dropped with the introduction of Phase II software in January 2002, although almost all such links had already been removed by then.

The first UuU edit survived because the page only received one edit between the time that it was created and Wikipedia's conversion to the Phase II software. That edit was in May 2001 and turned the page into a redirect to U, where it remained until it was discovered as containing Wikipedia's earliest surviving edit in 2004. It was moved to the Wikipedia namespace in 2006. Browne has not edited the page since its creation; he has deeded all his contributions to Wikipedia, including the initial revisions of this page, into the public domain.

In December 2010, earlier archives were discovered by Tim Starling, though many of these edits are not present in Wikipedia page histories. The earliest edit found in these archives was made to HomePage, which read "This is the new WikiPedia!",[9] while the first article[c] created was WikiPedia.[d][3]

See also

  • Browne would use the eiffel.demon.co.uk domain until January 18, 2001, making a total of 22 edits. These edits are inaccessible through Special:Contributions due to bug 323, which prevents edits from usernames that start with a lower-case letter from appearing in Special:Contributions. (Lists of early edits affected by this bug are at User:Nemo bis/Bug 323 revisions).

Notes

  1. ^ a b Domain names were treated like IP addresses by UseModWiki, so neither "office.bomis.com" nor "eiffel.demon.co.uk" were proper usernames. ScottMoonen would be the first true named user later on January 16.
  2. ^ The first 10 were, in order, HomePage, WikiPedia, PhilosophyAndLogic, UnitedStates, PopularMusic, SportS, MathematicsAndStatistics, CountriesOfTheWorld, AaA, and AfghanistaN.[3]
  3. ^ The Main Page is not considered an article.
  4. ^ In December 2008, Jimmy Wales claimed to have made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!", but no such edit appears in Starling's archives, and Starling himself has speculated that the edit might have been made on a test wiki from January 10 that was later deleted.[10] Upon being notified of the newly-imported HomePage edits on his talk page in 2019, Wales retold this story, claiming that he deleted a lot of stuff "on the hard drive" to explain the absence of the edit.

References

  1. ^ KeptPages
  2. ^ CamelCase
  3. ^ a b c d e Starling rclog
  4. ^ eiffel.demon.co.uk (January 16, 2001). "SportS". Starling diff_log. Wikimedia Foundation.
  5. ^ Eiffel (September 24, 2016). "User talk:Eiffel". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved July 21, 2019.
  6. ^ a b Lih p. 64
  7. ^ eiffel.demon.co.uk (January 16, 2001). "UuU". Starling diff_log. Wikimedia Foundation.
  8. ^ JimboWales (February 6, 2001). "AaA". Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved July 21, 2019.
  9. ^ office.bomis.com (January 15, 2001). "HomePage". Starling diff_log. Wikimedia Foundation.
  10. ^ Starling, Tim (January 14, 2011). ""Hello world?"". WikiEN-l. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved July 19, 2019.

Bibliography

  • Lih, Andrew (2009). The Wikipedia REVOLUTION: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. New York, New York: Hyperion. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6.