[Wikipedia-l] Hunting for my first edit, is there a Wikimuseum of ancient data?

Mon Jan 3 22:35:41 UTC 2005

On Jan 1, 2005, at 6:06 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
> I have been asked on several occasions what my first edit on Wikipedia 
> was, and I admit to a certain curiousity myself. The problem is that I 
> really don't remember it; I believe I first came to Wikipedia back in 
> the UseModWiki days and IIRC the old edit histories from that era 
> weren't imported into the current database when the transition was 
> made to PHP wiki due to format incompatibilities.

They were imported some months later, after I re-wrote the conversion 
script a bit. However there are a couple issues:
* In the earliest weeks/months, the configuration was to delete old 
revisions after some time. (The default on UseModWiki.) Some early 
revisions therefore are not available from before this was changed.
* Some items between late December and early January may be missing, 
but I'm unsure of this (depends which backup was used then)
* The very last revision at conversion time had its user name field 
replaced with 'Conversion script' by the original conversion, and was 
not re-imported by the second import.
* Some pages were deleted, so it might just be gone. ;)
* Some users' older pages don't show up on special:Contributions due to 
a technical issue when new accounts were created.

> Brion recently set up a wiki with an old database dump of the english 
> wikipedia but it was corrupted. We talked in berlin about trying it 
> again. A wikimuseum of this sort would be great.

I plan to have it up in time for the January 15 fourth anniversary of 
Wikipedia. May have it up sometime this week if I've got time.

> Is there a database with ancient deletes in them kicking around 
> somewhere? This would be handy for an unrelated reason too, there're 
> some old RfC pages I participated in once upon a time that have been 
> similarly deleted that I wouldn't mind having copies of for future 
> reference.

Probably not, unless you can find an old deletion log page with that 
info.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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