Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia's oldest articles

Oldest articles listed for deletion

UuU listed for deletion at RfD on October 1, 2005

This is the nomination

UuU → Roentgenium -- This one is a bit controversial as its history apparantly contains the oldest edit on wikipedia, however I don't think it should be left to clutter up the main namespace. I'd be fine with it being moved off to some subpage of a wikipedia-namespace article on the history of wikipedia though. --fvw * 21:33, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

to stop this deletion, please go to Wikipedia:Redirects_for_deletion#October_1. 132.205.45.148 16:58, 4 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

ScottMoonen listed for deletion at RfD on October 2, 2005

This is the nomination

ScottMoonen → User:ScottMoonen -- Like the above, there used to be a very old article at this place (which I moved to the appropriate user subpage) and people are claiming it should be kept because of external links. It's a speedy deletion candidate, but what the hell, let's chatter about it. I'd posit that historycruft belongs in the Wikipedia and User namespaces. --fvw * 04:58, 2 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

to stop this deletion, please go to Wikipedia:Redirects_for_deletion#October_2. 132.205.45.148 17:05, 4 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The page has now been history merged with the userpage, and the remaining redirect speedy deleted as a redirect to a userpage. (So the old edits remain and are now in the history of User:ScottMoonen – Gurch 15:17, 5 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

User comments

Perhaps the comments by Pcb21 and others should be incorporated as copy; into what is now, I think, an article. - Roy Boy ⁸⁰⁰ 17:51, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone here got an idea of what the oldest vandalism/revert is? 219.74.22.10 07:54, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Blast it!

UuU's been deleted too! 68.39.174.238 16:12, 12 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Don't worry, the "oldest edit" is still preserved at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:UuU&oldid=291430. - dcljr (talk) 05:16, 29 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User: Eiffel

Notice that this user created the early UuU, and the first creator of TransporT links to this user page as well, could this be the first registered user, along with ScottMoonen? They appear to have made the only edits on Jan 16th, 2001. JeremyMcCracken 22:16, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's difficult to tell, because history wasn't permanently kept until the software was changed in 2002, before then only the last few revisions would be stored. Several other edits were made on that day, and I imagine Wikipedia's first day too, but those are the only ones that still survive. I'd imagine Jimbo himself was the first registered user, anyway. Billy H 08:25, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Merging

... Would delete Wikipedia's oldest edit. So, No. Jorcoga^† 23:13, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Another old article

This one has remained a stub and is from the 25th February 2002. Does this count?

ircII

Simply south 13:10, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oldest town article

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=AbbevilleFrance&diff=prev&oldid=233252 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Simply south (talk • contribs) 17:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oldid=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/?oldid=1, which is actually not the oldest despite its name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/?curid=6 (18:12, 18 January 2001 office.bomis.com), which is the smallest curid on enwp.

Bennylin (talk) 07:31, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think you meant to link to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6. I just broke the latter link so I could history merge the very first edit of "AmericanSamoa" with the article American Samoa. See this diff. That now makes it the article with the oldest unbroken history, beating the West Virginia article by five days. Thanks for your help in breaking that record, even though you probably didn't intend it. :-) Graham87 16:07, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It breaks the record by six days, actually. Graham87 16:11, 25 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Logs

I looked through the logs mentioned here [1]. Pretty sure I won't have been the first person to try to figure them out, but here are some things they appear to show:

The first page on the log is titled "HomePage", and was created as a list of categories.
The second is titled "Wikipedia" and was created with the content: WikiPedia is a wide-open encyclopedia project. Who knows where it will go? We invite everyone to contribute. Just pick a topic, write an article. You can do so anonymously or give yourself credit. If you see an error, you can instantly edit an article to fix it.
The oldest surviving edit ([2]) appears to be the 33rd edit on the log, representing the creation of Wikipedia's 11th page. User:Eiffel who did this edit appears to be the first Wikipedian not based in the Bomis offices and this was his 8th edit.
The first discussion appears to have been about what code to use for a Wikilink.
The first thing we would now think of as a policy appears to be "BeBoldInUpdatingPages", presumably an ancestor of WP:BOLD.
The first mainspace page of on the log was called "PhilosophyAndLogic". It consisted of a list of 5 well-known philosophers and Ayn Rand. I'd say this constitutes Wikipedia's first breach of NPOV. No complaints appear to have been raised against the editor involved, though. The very next edit may have been to blank the page (but I'm not sure - it looks more likely to have been to insert spaces between the list items).
The second mainspace page was "UnitedStates", presumably an ancestor of United States, which was created as a partial list of States.
The first page to have proper article content was "Afghanistan".
The first userpage looks like it was created on 16th Jan 2001 and belonged to User:ScottMoonen.
The oldest article that is now a Featured Article is Australia.

Cheers! --FormerIP (talk) 20:23, 11 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wow! Is there any cyber-archaeological evidence to support Jimbo's recollection here? Cheers! Woz2 (talk) 12:26, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently not, unfortunately. Graham87 12:30, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I guess we'll have to hope some sleuth finds an archive of the 10 January 2001 test wiki. Cheers! Woz2 (talk) 13:10, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Move to mainspace?

I found this very interesting and I'm wondering if this article should be moved into main space, and linked to from the present shorter version at History of Wikipedia#Founding of Wikipedia. Thoughts? Woz2 (talk) 10:57, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! I rewrote the page to make it more readable some time ago. However I think it's a bit too self-referencial to be moved wholesale into the main namespace, but parts of it could certainly be copied there. Graham87 12:13, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Nupedia listserv

Great stuff. Another source might be the Wayback When Machine's captures of the Nupedia list serv. Example. Cheers! Woz2 (talk) 12:28, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure what to do with this...

So, I found this page: [3]. It seems to be the discussion that inspired the "for other meanings of this word, see (disambiguation name)". I'm not sure if this is of use, but I'll post it anyway. TVShowFan122 (talk) 09:29, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Cool! Graham87 15:44, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Huh. Origin of the first hanote! Interesting history. -- œ^™ 05:40, 6 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The oldest edits

I have been told in Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 57#Wikipedia's oldest edits that User:Tim Starling's discovery is now at https://web.archive.org/web/20110614170356/http://noc.wikimedia.org/~tstarling/wikipedia-logs-2001-08-17.7z , and that proved to be so. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 13:51, 3 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- This link (which points to a directory) is more official. Graham87 03:27, 4 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]