On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 6:07 PM, Tyler programmer651@comcast.net wrote:
How come, when I go to the edit history of the main page, I can't find a revision from 2001? Only 2002. Is it because of that software change?
You hit the nail on the head. Revisions from the UseModWiki days are sketchy at best; many of them were converted, but it wasn't a 100% reliable process, and iirc much of the revision history simply wasn't kept (by design).
I love your enthusiasm, Tyler, and I don't want to tread on that. You should absolutely keep learning about Wikimedia's history, because if you want to contribute, there's no such thing as too much background knowledge.
I do, however, feel the need to point out that this isn't really the forum for the questions you've been asking over the past couple of weeks. I'm sure there are tons of people who'd be happy to help you out with these sorts of questions, and if you haven't already discovered it I'd like to point you to IRC[1], where there are lots of old-timers with a plethora of institutional knowledge. Most of your questions can be answered with a link to an article on Meta, or in the Wikipedia namespace on the English Wikipedia, and you're probably best off finding people who know where to direct you.
Cheers,
Austin Hair Foundation-l Administrator
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org