I know that the first article on Ar Wiki was "water" which was created on July 11, 2003 https://ar.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A1&dir=prev&action=history and this is the date on which the community celebrates Ar wiki anniversary every year. I asked about that edit on 2001 earlier and found that it's an error in timestamp as Guillaume has mentioned. I believe that the automatic way is not the best way to get accurate dates. It would be better if we create a page on meta and ask community on different wikis to contribute to it. Maybe we can ask them on Wikimedia-l?
On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 6:33 AM, Joe Sutherland jsutherland@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks for this Guillaume! It's not as easy as one would imagine...
Joe
On 6 July 2015 at 21:30, Ed Erhart eerhart@wikimedia.org wrote:
You might be interested in talking with Graham87 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Graham87, who's done a lot of work with importing old edits from nostalgia.wiki.
--Ed
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 11:04 PM, Guillaume Paumier < gpaumier@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Le lundi 6 juillet 2015, 15:50:21 Joe Sutherland a écrit :
It's kind of odd that there's no list anywhere already; I can't be the first person to ask this! But that would be much appreciated Guillaume
:)
So, I've got a preliminary list, but it looks like we might need to find a better way of identifying the creation date than the earliest timestamp, because it gives some weird results: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/P895
Here's an excerpt from the top of the list:
19700101000000: zhwikisource 20010115000000: arwiki 20010116200833: enwiki 20010116200833: nostalgiawiki 20010223175216: enwikibooks 20010308131402: elwiki 20010317014148: cawiki 20010402182741: dewiki
BUT:
- zhwikisource wasn't created in 1970 (or we've been lied to for a long
time).
- arwiki wasn't created before enwiki, and enwikibooks and elwiki weren't
created before cawiki.
- nostalgia wiki has exactly the same earliest timestamp as enwiki?
Suspicious.
- Some wikis don't return an earliest timestamp at all (?!), see bottom
of the list.
So there definitely are oddities; they're probably due to errors with timestamps, or servers losing time, etc. (see https://www.facebook.com/gpaumier/posts/10154157729588475 for a similar issue I recently discovered, and that Tim helped resolve). Therefore, revision timestamps are probably not a reliable way to determine the creation date of a wiki.
As a wikiarchaeologist, I do find this kind of stuff incredibly interesting, though, so I'll look into it further during my Copious Free Time™, but likely after Wikimania. (I like the fact that I seem to have inadvertently discovered a way to identify all edits across wikis with an aberrant timestamp!)
-- Guillaume Paumier
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