Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
On 10 March 2004, User:Ludraman asked on the village pump, "Just out of interest - what is the oldest article on Wikipedia? Shouldn't we frame it and put it on display somewhere?! :-)". This page represents the results found in answering that query:
It is believed Jimbo said he made the first ever edit to Wikipedia, a test edit.
During the conversion from Phase 1 software to Phase 2 software the history of most pages was temporarily lost. User:Brion VIBBER later rescued all historical page edit data that were still around and merged into the Phase 2 and later Phase 3 (now MediaWiki) database. Some of the very oldest page histories are believed to be lost completely, however many edits from the period have been kept.
Some old edits found by hand were:
- 7 February 2001 - WolfgangMozart, can be found here
- 20 February 2001 - Leisure, can be found here
- 23 January 2001 - ThomasEdison, Jimbo Wales' oldest recorded edit (as User:JimboWales), can be found here
User:Andre Engels then ran a SQL query and found the oldest existing page:
- 16 January 2001, the second day of Wikipedia - Wikipedia:UuU found here
Also from January 16:
- Transport, can be found here
- User:ScottMoonen, can be found here
The oldest page for which there is no break in the history because of being changed into a redirect is List of female tennis players, which has a version from 6 February 2001.
Special:Oldest articles lists those pages that haven't been edited for the longest time. As of July 2006, these articles have remained unchanged for about two years.
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.
