Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Shortcut

WP:HWPP

The history of Wikipedia is more than the story of the development of its external face. There is also the story of the development of its processes and the people who contributed to that development. This is the part of the history that is likely to be of interest only to editors. This is still an incomplete history, and missing topics are continually added.

Processes

Wikipedia:Featured articles

Originally created in 2001, and moved from
Wikipedia:Brilliant prose
to the current title in March 2004.
Originally, anybody could add an article to the list; there was no review process at all.
a poll
ending 12 August 2004. Sixteen users voted to ratify Raul654 into the position he was already occupying, four voted for a community wide open election and four voted to have an election only if Raul654 didn't want the job.

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates was created as "Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates" by Eloquence on 24 June 2003 as a place to vote for or against proposed new featured articles. Updated every few days; articles now stay for 5 days or more (previously a week) and now use transcluded subpages

Wikipedia:Peer review was created by Wapcaplet on 17 July 2003 as a central place to list articles for comments from the community. It now uses transcluded subpages.

In June 2003,

Wikipedia:Featured article removal candidates was split from the main FAC page by Timwi. On 12 June 2006, Raul654 merged it with Wikipedia:Featured article review, which was created by TUF-KAT

on 8 November 2005.

Stubs

Questions to answer: How did the term evolve, how it came to be split in topic stubs, when was the first substub discovered... Also, founding of
WP:SFD
.

According to Manning,

the term "stub" in the Wikipedia context was created by Larry Sanger, and existed since day one of the 'pedia.

Manning states that he began to collect a personal list of stubs in September 2001 and subsequently moved them to

MyRedDice, who noted that a similar system had already been implemented at Wikipedia:NPOV dispute

.

Here is an example of a stub tagging in November 2003 by

6 December 2003, Mattworld created a personal sandbox

with the text:

This article is a fixing it
.

Three days later, Mattworld used this text to create msg:Stub (since moved to Template:Stub). The earliest discussion shows that it was widely adopted. However, it appears that it was at first substituted, not transcluded. (It is unclear when transcluding became the norm.) In March 2004, Ausir stated that he had created Template:Tolkienstub (since moved to Template:Tolkien-stub), what appears to be first stub for a sub-topic, and suggested creating more such sub-topic stubs, though this was not done in any systematic way.

On

poke-stub}} and suggesting that other stub sub-types be created, following the categories already on the articles. His two suggestions were "{{lang-stub}} for stubs on languages or {{auto-stub

}} for automobiles". This was basically a restatement of Ausir's earlier post, but seems to have been misinterpreted to be a proposal to create stub sub-categories. This de facto proposal was met with approval and its implementation largely brought stubs to their current form and structure.

On 20 July 2004,

deletion discussion

was started, resulting in the deletion of the template.

The proliferation of stubs prompted

Sn0wflake turned Wikipedia:Stub from a redirect into a page using project content. Also in May 2005, the "stub types for deletion" process was started by Grm wnr

.

Collaborations

Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week

Collaboration of the week (COTW) was created as Article of the week (AOTW) on

6 May 2004

having received 12 votes over 8 days.

The idea was to provide a central location to identify, select and improve non-existent (red link) or very short (stub) articles, mobilising the resources of the whole Wikipedia community to cooperate on a single selected article and create as close as possible to a featured-standard article within one week. Following a

22 August 2004

.

COTW has always used approval voting, that it only votes in favour of a nominee with votes against not being allowed. As of

21 April 2005, only one vote has been tied, when Renaissance was tied with Baghdad with 21 votes each. After an extension of 24 hours, Renaissance gained 5 more votes and was selected, although Baghdad was selected the following week. Following a close vote

, the present procedure was adopted of extending voting by 24 hours, and then selecting the article by seniority (that is, the article that was nominated first).

Since June 2004, COTW nominees have been pruned (that is, removed and archived in Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week/Removed) if they fail to generate sufficient interest and votes. The pruning threshold is set at 5 votes per week, increased from the original 4 votes per week in late 2004 because there was consensus that nominees were taking too long to be selected as COTW, disspiating the goodwill of nominators and voters. Previously, nominees were pruned on an ad hoc basis.

Years before COTW was created, the very first organized collaboration to improve an article was started when a short "

Wikipedia:Announcements August 2001

) .

Although COTW has

Academia, Siege, Space Race, League of Nations and Military history of the Soviet Union

) .

Past proposals to improve COTW include having two COTWs, having subsidiary COTWs for special interest areas (many of which were created in fits of enthusiasm in late 2004, but few of which have retained enough interest to remain active), listing the COTW on the main page.

On 14 August 2006, COTW was merged with the

Wikipedia:Article Creation and Improvement Drive, which became the Wikipedia:Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive in May 2007, which has been semi-active at best since early-mid 2009. The last COTW article appears to have been Lee Smith (baseball)

.

Countering Systemic Bias

Created by Xed on 22 September 2004 to identify and correct systemic bias in Wikipedia, manifested by the poor state of articles on important topics, such as countries and cultures in the Third World, and based largely on the theory that this neglect was a product of the demographics of the participants.

In September 2004, the foundations of CSB were laid at User:Xed/CROSSBOW (now located at Wikipedia:CROSSBOW), an acronym for Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias Of Wikipedia. The page was the immediate result of a discussion on the Village Pump. Much initial work was done by User:Xed, User:Jmabel, User:Filiocht, and User:Solitude. A draft manifesto was produced by Jmabel at Sept 23, 2004. After a poll it was decided to remould the initiative into a Wikiproject and to name the project Countering Systemic Bias.

Although CSB has been focused mainly on highlighting areas and topics that lack sufficient coverage, early on there was much discussion of the possibility of this project being involved more in recruiting participants from currently underrepresented demographics.

[TBC]

Wikipedia:Article improvement drive

Article improvement drive (AID) was created in early 2005 as a counterpart to COTW. COTW limits itself to non-existent or stub articles, and many articles, while wholly deficient in themselves, were rejected as COTW nominees for not meeting the relatively strict criteria. Non-stub articles in need of collaborative improvement

[process - TBC]

Wikipedia:Translation into English

Although translation of materials across Wikipedias has happened from early on, some discussions led to the

WP:TIE) page, which was created and continues to be informally managed by User:Jmabel; the related Wikipedia:Translators available was spun out in September 2004 by HappyDog

. The page allows a systematic way for Wikipedians to request, coordinate, and announce translations of articles (or portions of articles) from other Wikipedias to the English Wikipedia.

At about the same time as

WP:TIE was created, we also reworked Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English

, a place to coordinate work on material in foreign languages that is added to the English-language Wikipedia. This material is usually added anonymously; it can come in the form of new articles or additions to existing articles; and it contains a disproportionate number of copyright violations.

Deletion

Articles for deletion (AFD), originally started as Wikipedia:Wikipedia utilities/Page titles to be deleted

, went through many changes before reaching its present form of 3-level-templates.

discussion period changed from 5 days to 7 as of May 02, 2009 Special:Permalink/283083186 WT:Articles_for_deletion/Archive_52#Proposal_to_change_the_length_of_deletion_discussions_to_7_days discussion.

The GRider case.

WP:PROD

proposed January 27, 2006 [1]
Became policy April 4, 2006 [2]
Due to a Wikipedia:Toolserver breakdown, PROD was suspended from 12 April to 13 April 2006, until workarounds were instituted.suspension notice, restoration notice
delay period changed from 5 days to 7 as of May 02, 2009 [3] discussion.
"Sticky PROD" for Biographies of living people was introduced on April 3, 2010 special:Permalink/353718006, for articles created after March 18, 2010. The policy was proposed on January 20, 2010.

WP:CSD

evolution

VFD to AFD

VFU to DRV

creation of MFD

current process is outlined at Wikipedia:Deletion process

Wikipedia:Administrators

An anon on 2 April 2002 notes on the historical page

Tim Shell, Larry Sanger, Koyaanis Qatsi

appear to be the de facto editorial/censor board. In the following exchange the anon noted Presumably some political process for deciding this must evolve... "electing sherrifs" or whatever...

Info from User:NoSeptember/crat stats#Adminship promotion history:

In the early days (2001 through early 2003) Jimbo approved sysop promotions. Requests were either emailed to Jimbo or done on the mailing list, a fairly ad hoc process during this period. (the actual flagging was done by a developer, this could be Jimbo, Eloquence, Ed Poor or others)
From March 2003 through mid-June 2003 promotions became more numerous and routine and were done through the mailing list (a request and few thumbs up were sufficient to get promoted by a developer). Ed Poor and Eloquence did most of these. Only the contentious cases with an objection to promotion required a final OK by Jimbo.
In mid-June 2003 the process was moved from the mailing list to
WP:RFA
and Eloquence and Ed Poor continued to do the flagging for a few months. Then the job of flagging new sysops was assumed by Tim Starling almost exclusively until the advent of the bureaucrat system.
In mid-February 2004, the new bureaucrats system went live and from that point until now it has continued. As can be seen in the chart above, Angela was the most active in the early days of bureaucrats, and then Cecropia became the most active until he resigned in 2006. Throughout the period many bureaucrats have participated in the promotion process, some more actively than others.

The records of early promotions from the mailing list can be harder to find. Links to the mailing list emails about promotions through mid-June 2003 can be found at NoSeptember/RfA chronological.

Bad image list

Goatse.cx
The Autofellatio debacle

Notability

See Wikipedia:Notability/Historical

Projects

Wikipedia:Esperanza

Notable contributors

This section identifies editors who are prominent for something other than number of edits.

User:Jimbo Wales – one of the founders of Wikipedia.
Jimbo Wales
who helped shape the early Wikipedia. Since leaving the project, he has been visible chiefly for criticizing what he sees as its failings.
User:BenKovitz – played a role in Wikipedia's early history.
User:Magnus Manske – author of the precursor of the current software that runs Wikipedia (a PHP script named "phase II").
User:Lee Daniel Crocker – author of the initial version of the current software that runs Wikipedia – MediaWiki.
User:Brooke Vibber – first employee of the Wikimedia Foundation and its original CTO.
Wikimedia
.
User:Essjay – claimed to be a university professor but was not – see Essjay controversy.
User:Raul654 – the Featured Article Director (see above). He is variously referred to as 'Raul' and 'Mark' (his real name).
transclusions
.
Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion
.
bots
and scripts.
Robert Clark Young
and was permanently banned for tampering with articles on rival authors.