Thanks for this Guillaume! It's not as easy as one would imagine...

Joe

On 6 July 2015 at 21:30, Ed Erhart <eerhart@wikimedia.org> wrote:

You might be interested in talking with Graham87, who's done a lot of work with importing old edits from nostalgia.wiki.

--Ed

On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 11:04 PM, Guillaume Paumier <gpaumier@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Le lundi 6 juillet 2015, 15:50:21 Joe Sutherland a écrit :
> It's kind of odd that there's no list anywhere already; I can't be the
> first person to ask this! But that would be much appreciated Guillaume :)

So, I've got a preliminary list, but it looks like we might need to find a
better way of identifying the creation date than the earliest timestamp,
because it gives some weird results:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/P895

Here's an excerpt from the top of the list:

19700101000000: zhwikisource
20010115000000: arwiki
20010116200833: enwiki
20010116200833: nostalgiawiki
20010223175216: enwikibooks
20010308131402: elwiki
20010317014148: cawiki
20010402182741: dewiki

BUT:
* zhwikisource wasn't created in 1970 (or we've been lied to for a long time).
* arwiki wasn't created before enwiki, and enwikibooks and elwiki weren't
created before cawiki.
* nostalgia wiki has exactly the same earliest timestamp as enwiki?
Suspicious.
* Some wikis don't return an earliest timestamp at all (?!), see bottom of the
list.

So there definitely are oddities; they're probably due to errors with
timestamps, or servers losing time, etc. (see
https://www.facebook.com/gpaumier/posts/10154157729588475 for a similar issue
I recently discovered, and that Tim helped resolve). Therefore, revision
timestamps are probably not a reliable way to determine the creation date of a
wiki.

As a wikiarchaeologist, I do find this kind of stuff incredibly interesting,
though, so I'll look into it further during my Copious Free Time™, but likely
after Wikimania. (I like the fact that I seem to have inadvertently discovered
a way to identify all edits across wikis with an aberrant timestamp!)

--
Guillaume Paumier

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Ed Erhart
Editorial Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

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Joe Sutherland
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