On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 6:32 AM, Sam Blacketer sam.blacketer@googlemail.com wrote:
On 8/18/08, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
2008/8/18 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
Looks like it predates our ability to easily find it - would nostalgia.wp be worth looking at?
...which promptly takes us back to late November:
http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_W._Bush&diff=178...
Nostalgia doesn't seem to go back beyond c. Nov 20th.
If you look at the 'HomePage' on nostalgiawiki http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage, it seems from the note on the bottom that vandalism was well known:
"Note: Unless you have the administrator password, you cannot currently edit this page. While this is unfortunate, it has turned out to be necessary to prevent vandalism of this page, which has occurred on several occasions." --
The first message I found about vandalism from Jimmy, apparently related to a discussion onwiki, was from Oct. 2001: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-October/000624.html
when the homepage was not yet locked. The very next message was the famous "temporary measures" one, when adminship was instituted: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-October/000625.html
Note that this was five months or so after the creation of other language Wikipedias, Wiktionary, and about four months after kpjas suggested a database infrastructure might be necessary: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-June/000185.html
There are several people from the beginning who are still active on this list who would have a better idea of when vandalism started, though. My guess would be with the first slashdotting.
( as a side note, most of my favorite messages ever to the list come from those early months, such as Larry asking the president to correct his own biography: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-March/000069.html and Jimmy asking "so what's this list for, anyway? http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-January/000011.html )
phoebe