[Foundation-l] Wikipedia is fun

Mon Mar 8 01:17:01 UTC 2010

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 6:07 PM, Tyler <programmer651 at comcast.net> wrote:
> How come, when I go to the edit history of the main page, I can't find a revision from 2001? Only 2002.  Is it because of that software change?

You hit the nail on the head.  Revisions from the UseModWiki days are
sketchy at best; many of them were converted, but it wasn't a 100%
reliable process, and iirc much of the revision history simply wasn't
kept (by design).

I love your enthusiasm, Tyler, and I don't want to tread on that.  You
should absolutely keep learning about Wikimedia's history, because if
you want to contribute, there's no such thing as too much background
knowledge.

I do, however, feel the need to point out that this isn't really the
forum for the questions you've been asking over the past couple of
weeks.  I'm sure there are tons of people who'd be happy to help you
out with these sorts of questions, and if you haven't already
discovered it I'd like to point you to IRC[1], where there are lots of
old-timers with a plethora of institutional knowledge.  Most of your
questions can be answered with a link to an article on Meta, or in the
Wikipedia namespace on the English Wikipedia, and you're probably best
off finding people who know where to direct you.

Cheers,

Austin Hair
Foundation-l Administrator

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC