Assuredly, Gardner is just repeating what Wales has told her as she was not involved in the early stages of Wikipedia. This leaves us with Wales's word. Uncharitably, you can assume that this is just a half truth or falsehood designed to advance the sole founder theory; however, it is possible that the purported edit happened not on Wikipedia but on the short-lived wiki hosted at Nupedia, which would not even have been called Wikipedia at the time. Unless (until?) a full backup of that wiki surfaces, we have nothing to go on. All that I can find of the old NupediaWiki is a version preserved on the new Wikipedia within the Starling archive. The text "Hello World!" is not found in that version, though it's quite possible that someone else removed it after Wales added it. Either way, "Hello World!" was not the first Wikipedia edit. It may have been the first NupediaWiki edit, but that's not quite the same thing. On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008(a)reagle.org>wrote;wrote:

On 14/01/11 07:49, Joseph Reagle wrote: There was a wiki created on January 10, said to be a test wiki, which was later deleted. Presumably it was the one referred to here: <http://web.archive.org/web/20030425173342/www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-January/000678.html> It's possible Jimmy's "Hello World" edit was made to that wiki. But we can be pretty sure that the first edit to the surviving UseModWiki instance was "This is the new WikiPedia!" -- Tim Starling