David Gerard wrote:
Question about obscure historical detail: Who picked UTC as Wikimedia time? When was this, and what was the thought process?
(the answer is almost certainly "Brion or Jimbo, early 2001, it's the obvious choice", but I'm just curious as to details.)
Maybe Lee in 2002? Here's what I dug up.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN633
This revision by Lee from July 10, 2002 added the ability for users to specify a time zone offset in hours. It also added three messages: timezonetext, localtime, and timezoneoffset.
Of particular note, the text for the timezonetext key reads:
Enter number of hours your local time differs from server (U.S. Pacific) time. For example, for U.S. East coast, enter "3".
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN635
This revision (same author and day) reiterates that the server time is "U.S. Pacific" when establishing the dellogpagetext and uploadlogpagetext messages.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN723
This revision by Brion from August 28, 2002 adds a first draft of Esperanto translations. I believe (I don't read and write Esperanto) that the uploadlogpagetext and dellogpagetext messages say that the server time is UTC. However, the timezonetext message appears to say that the server time is UTC-8 and that if you want to use Central European Time, you need to specify an offset of 9 hours.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN744
This revision by Lee from September 5, 2002 changes the timezonetext, uploadlogpagetext, and dellogpagetext messages to read "UTC" instead of "U.S. Pacific".
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN773
This revision by Brion from September 18, 2002 introduces the $wgLocaltimezone configuration variable. I've updated https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgLocaltimezone to note this.
Looking at early English Wikipedia contributions, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=56697 is the oldest edit I can find of a signed comment that includes a time zone: "05:42 Jul 21, 2002 (PDT)". There are many older signatures, to be sure, and some of them in early 2002 include a date, but without a time zone. This signature seems to confirm that the time zone was U.S. Pacific time in 2002.
MZMcBride