Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles
This page describes the earliest edits and articles that are in the current English Wikipedia database.
Explanation
Wikipedia originally used
No history was imported from the UseModWiki era of Wikipedia when it migrated to the
Earliest surviving edits and other data
In December 2010, Wikipedia backups containing all edits from Wikipedia's inception to 17 August 2001 were discovered by
Before the importation in 2019, no edits survived in the database from 15 January 2001, the day that Wikipedia was founded. Here is a list of edits that survive from the next day, 16 January. The list was compiled from an
- Wikipedia:UuU found here and in Nostalgia Wikipedia
- Transport found here, former oldest surviving edit still in the main namespace
- User:ScottMoonen found here
The oldest article for which there is no break in the history, either because of being changed into a redirect or a lack of surviving revisions, is
The first consecutively-numbered revisions, such as Revision #1 and Revision #5, were among the first edits made after Wikipedia converted from UseModWiki to the Phase II software. (Edits made before Revision #1 have higher revision ID numbers, because they were imported later, as discussed above.)
Special:AncientPages lists those pages that haven't been edited for the longest time. As of September 2023[update], the page was being updated periodically, and the oldest article listed was last edited in January 2013, meaning the article had remained unchanged for over ten years. Because it uses MediaWiki, all modern special pages work on the Nostalgia Wikipedia. The oldest entry on the ancientpages list on the Nostalgia Wikipedia is StandardPoodle, which has an entry from 17 January 2001. Similar functionality can also be found at Wikipedia:Database reports/Forgotten articles.
Archived copies of Wikipedia articles from early 2001
The appearance of some Wikipedia articles in early 2001 has been preserved by the Wayback Machine. Early examples include GNUFreeDocumentationLicense and AccessibleComputing; Wayback's preserved versions are those of January 20. The front page from February 28 can also be viewed.
See also
- The discussion that inspired the creation of this page from the village pump
- Wikipedia:Milestone articles, which lists article number 200,000, 500,000, 1,000,000, etc.
- Wikipedia:First 100 pages, the first 100 pages made on Wikipedia
- Category:Redirects with old history, which lists all the CamelCase articles before the automated conversion
- Wikipedia:New topics, new articles from 2001–02
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia NEWS/June 13 19 2001, the first summary of interesting content added, from 2001; an ancestor of "Did you know ..."
References
- ^ Also see the Signpost story
- ^ "The first Wikipedia edit to be sold as NFT". Christie's. 2 December 2021. Retrieved 5 December 2021.