[Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered

[Brian J Mingus]

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 at 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 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> 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 at 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 at gmail.com>
>> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered
>> > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>> >       <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> > Message-ID:
>> >       <AANLkTin9CjXR1S_eCfR3nR6Xmt6C4o=6oHDhTXP4JPzL at 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]
>> >
>> > 1. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline
>> > 2. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share
>> >
>> > On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Tim Starling <
>> tstarling at 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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>
>