User talk:NoSeptember/Early admins (20 Sept 2002)

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[edit] adminship history

This is a copy of a thread from User talk:NoSeptember.

Bear in mind that the edit histories prior to February 2002 are full of gaps and therefore misleading, see Wikipedia:Usemod_article_histories. At first, the KeptPages feature of UseMod only kept revisions less than two weeks old, so early edits were lost unless they had remained the most recent edit for the article at the time the timeout was adjusted. There were various bugs in KeptPages itself and in early conversion attempts, that together caused much of the history to be irretrievably lost. Further, the history importation was partly manual and confused by the then-new distinction between article space, Wikipedia space, and user space.

It's probably worth pointing out that adminship in the UseMod era was truly no big deal at all. It was prior to my involvement here, but I understand that we have not always had protected pages or the ability to block users, and that deletion was handled considerably differently in UseMod. Initially, a good deal of the administration was done by technical people using shell access to the server.

The main point being that any distinctions in the editing or adminship history of anyone who was here prior to the conversion to Phase II should not be made.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 22:41, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. I know there was a time when deleted articles were not recoverable too. Much has changed. NoSeptember talk 07:13, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] First Wikipedia admin?

This is a copy of a thread from Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous), with some good research similar to that on this page.

I read over the History of Wikipedia page and some related ones today. Afterwards, I began to wonder if anyone knows who the first adminstrator selected by the community was (I assume that Jimbo or some such person was the first, but I'd like to know who the first editor to become an admin was.) Does any one know? Cool3 21:53, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

The first admins were nominated and promoted via the mailing list without a vote, so there's unlikely to be information on it here. You could try searching the old mailing lists if you have sufficient Google-fu. Ziggurat 22:46, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the tip. Cool3 19:38, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
I have looked through the early mailing list archives, and it only goes so far. The process started out very informally and not all promotions are to be found there. If anyone has some good historical data on all this, please visit here and provide whatever information you have. NoSeptember talk 19:54, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the information! Cool3 20:48, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure Angela was one of the first, or at least one of the first who is still active. Deco 00:16, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
Angela arrived in January 2003 and became an admin in June 2003 when there were about 80 admins, which makes her election to the board in mid-2004 all the more impressive :-). See the link in my comment above for a list of the truly early admins. NoSeptember talk 09:03, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Administrators -check the Sep 20, 2002 entry for the first list of admins, then try to track which of the couple dozen there were first. Rmhermen 00:35, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

I did just that. Here are the results, where the dates are date/time of first edit and marks indicate whether they continue to be active:

RoseParks, Timshell, and WojPob first edited in January 2001, with RoseParks, a Nupedian like Jimbo, coming earliest (her first edit, an article creation in the old-fashioned Nupedia naming style). AstroNomer first edited in February 2001. Andre Engels, Jimbo Wales, Lee Daniel Crocker, and Stephen Gilbert first edited in March 2001. I'd give the award for earliest still-acive admin to Stephen Gilbert. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that many of our original admins remain with us today. Thank you to them all for your years of service. Deco 12:45, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Please note that, due to software changes, not all early edits still exist. These are therefore not accurate for first edits. Jimbo certainly did not "first" edit in March - see Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles. Many of the early editors came in from Nupedia - which was another of Jimbo's projects. Rmhermen 01:59, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
You're right, of course. It's unfortunate that this data was lost, although I admire Brian's ability to retain what he did despite massive database schema overhauls. It seems nobody knows who made the first edit, but I'm willing to believe the legend that it was a test edit by Jimbo or Brion. Deco 08:13, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Likewise, I was editing actively on Wikipedia's day one, having been a previous Nupedian like Rose. Most of these histories were lost with Clifford's old software. Likewise the histories of things like Admin status aren't really reliable before late 2002. You'll see me requesting admin status in March 2002 on the mailing list, for example, mainly because that was shortly after the installation of Magnus's script and I just hadn't gotten around to doing things like editing the main page yet. Clifford's and Magnus's software had the concept of "sysop", but it really wasn't used until after Magnus's software had been around awhile, and wasn't formalized into a community thing until long after we changed to my codebase. --LDC 20:23, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

There were quite a few requests on the mailing list in late July and August 2002, and then we have the list from September, but little in the mailing list before that period. I suspect that adminship was likely a more technical type of thing before July and somewhat limited in use (since deletions would be unrecoverable). If you can recall anything about early 2002, it would be interesting to know. For example, was it granted mostly to developers for cleanup type tasks? or given to any trusted user without regard to technical background? I have tried to find some information in article histories (with the old CamelCase type names that are now used as redirects) that may shed more light on this too. Anything you can remember would be appreciated. NoSeptember 20:49, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
On a semi-related note, I have found vague suggestions that some people became admins and then became former admins before the September list existed. If you can think of anyone who fits this description that is not listed here, let me know. NoSeptember 20:49, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Before 2002, the admins were basically just Jimbo, Jason, and Tim, as there wasn't much need for more. Larry was added as "Editor in Chief" early on, and when the database grew to the point where we needed more editors to do a few things we were reluctant to grant to everyone (basically just permanent deletions and moves), others were added. Editing the main page was soon made one of those things because of a lot of vandalism, and admin status was liberally granted (by Jimbo) to anyone who was basically well known and trusted not to be a vandal. As far as I know, the first one ever un-sysopped was The Cunctator, who was later reinstated. I don't remember whether or not this all happened before or after the September list, and he didn't participate on the mailing list. Also, the developers like Magnus and me were de facto admins because we had physical access to the database--indeed, I remember banning a user before we had any formal policy for that--something that had traditionally been Jimbo's province--and no one seemed to object at the time. Back then, just getting the job done was a higher priority than policies and procedures. --LDC 22:08, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

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