On Jan 1, 2005, at 6:06 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
I have been asked on several occasions what my first edit on Wikipedia was, and I admit to a certain curiousity myself. The problem is that I really don't remember it; I believe I first came to Wikipedia back in the UseModWiki days and IIRC the old edit histories from that era weren't imported into the current database when the transition was made to PHP wiki due to format incompatibilities.
They were imported some months later, after I re-wrote the conversion script a bit. However there are a couple issues: * In the earliest weeks/months, the configuration was to delete old revisions after some time. (The default on UseModWiki.) Some early revisions therefore are not available from before this was changed. * Some items between late December and early January may be missing, but I'm unsure of this (depends which backup was used then) * The very last revision at conversion time had its user name field replaced with 'Conversion script' by the original conversion, and was not re-imported by the second import. * Some pages were deleted, so it might just be gone. ;) * Some users' older pages don't show up on special:Contributions due to a technical issue when new accounts were created.
Brion recently set up a wiki with an old database dump of the english wikipedia but it was corrupted. We talked in berlin about trying it again. A wikimuseum of this sort would be great.
I plan to have it up in time for the January 15 fourth anniversary of Wikipedia. May have it up sometime this week if I've got time.
Is there a database with ancient deletes in them kicking around somewhere? This would be handy for an unrelated reason too, there're some old RfC pages I participated in once upon a time that have been similarly deleted that I wouldn't mind having copies of for future reference.
Probably not, unless you can find an old deletion log page with that info.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)