[Foundation-l] Old Wikipedia backups discovered

[Tim Starling]

On 15/12/10 11:17, Brian J Mingus 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.

I've long suspected that the early FAQs and history pages gave Larry
Sanger an exaggerated role because he wrote them himself. It will be
interesting to see if any such conclusion can be drawn from the
archives. Note that 979694938 was by dhcp058.246.lvcm.com, which
appears to be Larry.

By the way, the numbers in the revisions, e.g. 979694938, are UNIX
timestamps. That one was 17 Jan 2001, 01:28:58 UTC.

-- Tim Starling