Shirt a Phobia

Sample Page

There’s a lot of interesting forgotten stuff out there. These are my finds, some of which I’ll eventually be putting into the Wikipedia:Historical archive.

Project pages

Some of the very oldest pages still exist in hidden form. They were what we’d now think of as policy or guidance pages, and were created before there were namespaces in what’s now called article space. Later on editors cut-and-paste moved pages from their old CamelCase titles to new ones and converted the old titles into redirects. While articles usually had a straightforward transition in this way, the project page titles sometimes got re-redirected several times as project policies and guidelines evolved and lost any direct relation to their original content.

If you’re looking at one now, it’s almost certainly at least partially thanks to the tireless work of Graham87, who’s spent years painstakingly reassembling early page histories from fragments scattered across a variety of inconsistent archive sources. Kudos.

  • Wikipedia:What is a wiki (formerly at WhatIsaWiki) – January 2001
  • Wikipedia:Historical archive/Abandoned help pages from 2001, containing information about what much later became Help:Editing
    • HowDoesOneEditaPage – January 2001 (shortly after its 18th birthday someone with no understanding of history tried to have it deleted. They failed)
    • SummarizeDiscussion – January 2001
  • WikiPedians – January 2001
  • BrilliantProse – January 2001 (see the current version for a detailed history of the precursor to Featured Articles)
  • NamingConventions – January 2001
  • WhatIsaWiki – January 2001
  • DisRuption – January 2001
  • WhyArentThesePagesCopyedited – February 2001
  • Wikipedia:Topic creation – April 2001

Pages containing or linking to obscure revisions

Glitches

  • Duplicates on AtlasShrugged, which was de-CamelCased in 2002:
    • 09:27, 26 February 2001‎ – old title / new title‎
    • 05:47, 1 February 2001 – old title / new title
  • An edit from July 2002 attributed to “imported>10.58” instead of a user (also see the user page User:0)
  • The history of Wikipedia:Neutral point of view contains several revisions in December 2001 – January 2002 attributed to “Larry_Sanger” (ie, not clickable)
  • Pages with missing revisions:

Discussions

Tasks and reports

Bugs and features

Buried failures

Ideas which didn’t make it and got turned into redirects.

  • Wikipedia:User conflict policy – January 2004
  • Wikipedia:Metadirectory, one person’s series of mini indexes to guidance pages – February 2004
    • Wikipedia:Miniseries of Information
    • Wikipedia:Miniseries of Style and Operations
    • Wikipedia:Miniseries of Wikicivics
    • Wikipedia:Policy Library
  • Wikipedia:Principles of Definition – an attempt to define a “policy” based on Ancient Greek philosophy? Yeah… no. April 2004

Miscellany

  • The state of the article “How-to” on 29 January 2003 (which survived in progressively smaller form until it was converted to a redirect in 2021) – a charming nutshell of the vibe of the project in its early days

See also