Here is an interesting bit of history - the Wikipedia logo was first an American flag. Then Scott Moonen suggested we make it a globe:
In its first day of existences, because the nearest thing to hand for JimmyWales that was suitable for a logo was an American flag, WikiPedia had the American flag, OldGlory, for a logo.
ScottMoonen sensibly suggested:
I'd recommend you change the American flag logo. Exremely ethno-centric ''et. al.'' I think a globe logo would be much more fitting, if you want to keep with that metaphor. Or perhaps a book.
http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979773872.txt
- Brian
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Browsing through the earliest revisions in the revision index ( http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/revisions.html) is rather interesting and full of fodder for founder debates. Consider these very early revisions:
"[http://www.nupedia.com Nupedia.com] is an open content, international, peer reviewed project run by LarrySanger, who got the idea of supplementing NuPedia with a less formal "wiki" encyclopedia project. " - http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979694938.txt
"EditorInChief of NuPedia and instigator of Nupedia's wiki. " http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979690096.txt
Sanger's claims to coming up with the idea of adding the wiki concept to the online encyclopedia concept clearly go all the way back to the beginning. Of course, that doesn't speak to offline conversations that gave rise to the idea.
And Sanger clearly didn't have much faith in the concept:
None of this is to say that the Nupedia wiki will ''replace'' the main encyclopedia; of course it won't. But it will be an interesting ancillary endeavor! http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/979695982.txt
- Brian
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Here are a couple of quick indexes into the dump file. I didn't venture into the binary revision data. You'll find an alphabetized list of articles that contains all the diffs for each article in the order that they occured in the dump and a sorted index into each revision as well.
http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/
http://grey.colorado.edu/wikipedia_2001/Given that it's finals I don't even have enough time to dig through this at all. Guess I just wanted a distraction =)
- Brian
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:27 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.comwrote:
FYI, there is an existing timeline at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline
And lots of other wikipedia history pages on English, too.
:) Phoebe
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Moka Pantages mpantages@wikimedia.org wrote:
This is so exciting! To Steven's point: we've also started a page where folks can add bits of interesting information as they excavate the files [1]. Can't wait to dig in!
Congrats, Tim!
[1] http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_the_Beginning
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:20:10 -0800 From: Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: AANLkTin9CjXR1S_eCfR3nR6Xmt6C4o=6oHDhTXP4JPzL@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
This is fantastic, and the timing could not be better.
If anyone finds anything noteworthy, please add it to the timeline of Wikipedia that we're building at the 10th anniversary wiki,[1] as well
as
the other tools for cataloging interesting tidbits from our history.[2]
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com
wrote:
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Tim Starling <
tstarling@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of Wikipedia, from February, March and August
2001!
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