Talk:History of Wikipedia/Archive 1

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Semi-protection

I request semi-protection for this article. Too many people visit it and vandalism occurs often and this page shouldn't be vandalised more so than other pages. Zuracech lordum 09:18, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Duplication

Unfortunately, there is an existing timeline already in Meta [meta:Wikipedia_timeline]. There, I've been focusing on improving the pre-2002 items, trying to make sure there is a consistent formatting, and every entry has a specific date and reference. It appears that the time line on this page has had more care since 2002. I think would make a lot of sense to somehow consolidate these two pages so that one as a prose history, as well as a specific timeline. Actually, I am not that fond of the timeline being in Meta since many of the links that need to be 'en:' qualified. - Reagle 15:04, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Note also Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people and Wikipedia:Historic debates for substantial overlap. - BanyanTree 18:04, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Misc

I actually don't see the need for the paragraph that begins "In March 2002" if for no other reason than it seems out of place with the rest of the material. - Hephaestos 19:20 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

well that simplifies things. Martin 20:17 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Wikiquote and wikibooks are not, to date, important enough for a wikipedia article, in my opinion. Martin 21:56, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

This is a great article; does anyone think it should be linked up to the Main Page?? --Merovingian 09:15, Dec 6, 2003 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier if we added a timeline to this article, or even made the article consist of but a timeline, and there are links for the different stages if more information is required. Ludraman 20:50, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It's inappropriate to say little about the history in the main article. The article lengths are such that chunks of this article would fit in the main wikipedia article. How about just leaving a timeline here and moving the rest back?

Slashdot

The project received large numbers of participants after being mentioned three times on the tech website Slashdot — two minor mentions on March 5 and March 30, 2001, and then a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture website Kuro5hin on July 26.

It would be very informative if those mentions on slashdot were to be linked to directly after they are referred to, which will of coures involve digging them up... -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:04, 2004 Dec 27 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day

Would we really need an article about Wikipedia Day? Is it encyclopedic? Fredrik | talk 05:45, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

history of the "Current Events" page

I am trying to trace the history of the "Current Events" page for Wikipedia. I am able to trace the "Current Events" page back to the archive of January of 2002. Did the "Current Events" page exist in 2001? Was it archived? Can anyone confirm if this was originally on the "Current Events" page? --Memenen 2 July 2005 23:24 (UTC)

Prior to that, the history was lost. I can find http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_events. Notice, however, that nostalgia is a snapshot of how things were in the older software, and it lost history every few weeks. --cesarb 2 July 2005 23:37 (UTC)
Other resources
Wikipedia:Wikipedians_in_order_of_arrival - gives you a clue who to ask
Blank Google search for current events inurl:2001 site:mail.wikipedia.org shows that no-one talked about it much :)
This URL shows with a high degree of confidence that Topics removed from current events began in November 2001. If I was a gambling man, I would say that current events started in September 2001. Maybe The Cunctator would be a good person to ask. Pcb21| Pete 3 July 2005 00:25 (UTC)
I just explored the Internet Archives, my results suggest that the events of September 11 may have been what lead to the start of the Wikipedia Current Events page. --Memenen 3 July 2005 01:15 (UTC)

Censorship?

Why does the "F*lun Gong" article title have to be censored? Will spelling it out cause mainland China to block Wikipedia? Would pipelinking it help? — JIP | Talk 5 July 2005 06:22 (UTC)

I don't know. I'm not really sure how their Internet censorship system works. I pipelinked to the article, but left the title censored just in case. Ikusawa 01:20, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I've made it plaintext. WP:NOT censored for Chinese users. Revert if you have a good reason to do so, but please state it on this page. ral315 00:18, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

Most recent block from mainland China

I don't know whether this is accurate, but Reporters without Borders indicates access has been blocked since October 18th in some areas (it names Shanghai). Also, is information on the status of Wikipedia access in the PRC really best placed in this History overview article? Should it be spun off into a separate article? It seems a little strange to see it tacked on at the end of the timeline there, is all. — MC MasterChef :: Leave a tip — 14:42, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

I got it from the Chinese Wikipedia... it says "October 19, 5pm (UTC+8)". It might have been earlier, though.
I suppose we can also make the section its own article. The Chinese Wikipedia has a separate article already, which is also very detailed. I might translate it later tonight. -- ran (talk) 17:26, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Article to update!!! Wikipedia is partially unblock (except the chinese version and some english article...) please see Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China Froggy helps ;-) 08:24, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

LL B,B,

Article count milestones

Do we really have to list every article count milestone ever made in the english wikipedia? It's just banal trivia for anyone but the most wiki-obsessed. I can understand maybe leaving the 100,000 and 500,000 milestones, but let's get rid of the rest of them. Kaldari 22:41, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I like the article count data because I'm going to use this data for some work I'm doing. The charts on this page only go up to 2002. BTW, I would like to have a page filled with stats: history of # users, articles by language, # words, #edits, etc.

Image selection vote

Around October 15, 2003, the current Wikipedia logo was installed. The logo concept was selected by a voting process, which was followed by a revision process to select the best variant. The final selection was created by David Friedland based on a logo design and concept created by Paul Stansifer.

Could we have a wikilink to that historical vote? - RoyBoy 800 17:59, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia calendar

Please take a look at Wikipedia:2003, Wikipedia:2004 from Category: Wikipedia years. Wikipedia as community deserves to keep track of its own history, of events which may be not very encyclopedic in the world scale, but of interest to wikipedians.

This may help declutter this, History of Wikipedia, article, in particular, to address the concern posted above, in #Article count milestones, while retaining the info.

I understand that today, of only 5 years of history, the "calendar" may seem redundant, but I seriously hope for wikipedia to live and grow.

Potential additions:

  • start dates of non-english wikis,
  • new policies introduced,
  • dates of board of directors elections,

etc. mikka (t) 20:53, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

2005 section

I added the Nature comparative experience because I think it is an interesting point, the first true comparative experience. In that, I think this is really more usefull than the Seigenthaler controversy which was the history of the sentence "... may be involve in ..." Revert is need in some extrem cases, other way, we have to Improve article. So I will restaure this, free to every body to improve "my" sentence and to neutralise them if need. 82.244.80.175 = french User:Yug, french active editor.

Some omitted history

This article seems remarkably light on the part of Wikipedia's history in which its fundamental principles and habits were established--its first year. Why is that? --Larry Sanger 00:34, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Just like you, I'm not going to touch this article. I "left" Wikipedia before you did, and my editing could be construed as controversial. However, I think the current article's main problem is that it is a "chronicle" (as poets would write for their kings) and not history writing. This is a list of events tracked by the people who experienced them, it would be "original research" (not allowed here!) if only it were "research". Any proper "history of X" article should probably start with a section on historiography (who has written history about this? which conflicting theories are there about this history? Marx vs Adam Smith? Larry Sanger vs Jimbo vs that public toilet guy?). This criticism can be made of many "History of X" articles in Wikipedia, and the "History of Wikipedia" will probably be researched a lot later than the "History of the Internet" or the "History of computers", all of which are quite poor. I think you (and others) should go and do the history research, and publish somewhere where it matters. Then others might be able to reference your work in a future version of this Wikipedia article. --LA2 00:41, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Class action

Should this class-action suit be mentioned in the article? It's linked at the bottom of Jimmy Wales. --zenohockey 07:55, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

I think this : It appear than Britanica stay of a better quality than its concurrent, but not so much, which can confirm the " de facto " concurrence between Britannica and the new alternative Wikipedia. have to be in the 2005 Nature' article analyse. Yug (talk) 16:02, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

With user:Dmytro :

have you a source to write "However, some of the Wikipedia articles were found poorly organized and confusing." [1] All what I have read was something such as "both have mistakes and organized confusions" (about the 50 articles look by Nature). If you talk about "some of the Wikipedia articles" out of this 50, please correct your sentence. Yug (talk) 16:02, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

One millionth English article

When is this projected and how will it be marked? It is a very notable achievement in the development of the web. Perhaps a 'plaque' on the 1000000th article?[[Btljs 13:40, 19 January 2006 (UTC)]]

I like the idea that when 1,000,000 is reached, creation of new articles be blocked for a month while Wikipedia does nothing but work on improvement of existing articles. --JWSchmidt 02:36, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
This never happened, it looks like. --WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 17:48, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Monobook.css and MediaWiki namespace editing

Dates on which administrators could edit these from Wikipedia:Administrators. --JWSchmidt 02:32, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Link please

I dare not edit this page ;-) so could someone please put up a link to User:Larry Sanger/Origins of Wikipedia? TIA. --Larry Sanger 02:05, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Hi Larry. We usually do not link to anything outside the main namespace from articles. --Phroziac . o º O (♥♥♥♥ chocolate!) 01:21, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
Hey Larry, careful now, Jimbo could just erase u from wikipedia, he calls the shots here, ultimately. The article already says you are cofounder, and most reasonable people dont think Jimbo was sole founder. Jörg Vogt 10:50, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

#s

Hundreds of thousands of contributors. Over 100k logged in with at least 10 edits. +sj + 23:32, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

The name "Wikipedia"

It'd be interesting to find the first instance of the name "Wikipedia". I found this response from Larry Sanger to his own thread on nupedia-l (!) called "Let's make a wiki". Could anyone confirm whether this is it? Cormaggio @ 18:24, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, that link should be [2] - the previous link is to the beginning of the thread. Cormaggio @ 20:19, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

The removal of self-references (wikilinking to non-main namespace pages)

When the self-references were removed, some links with nicer look-like names were changed to a not-as-good naming style -- the page you end up on. Shouldn't the better names return? I ask since I don't feel like it right now. --WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 17:51, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

"The free encyclopedia" - trivia question

Does anyone know when and how the slogan "The free encyclopedia" began to be used? Who suggested it? Was there ever a discussion or a vote? Or was it just self-evident?

I looked at the "nostagia Wikipedias" listed at the bottom of the article, and they don't have the slogan. On the other hand, look here to see "The Free Encyclopedia Project" used quite early by Richard Stallman.

My own hunch: This was just so self-evident that it began to be used at some point early on, and then when it was coded to appear at the top of each page it began universally recognized and accepted.

Does anyone else have additional ideas or information? Dovi 17:46, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Sources!

This page has been frustrating me for a long time. A key principle of the Wikipedia is verifiability. Sadly, on a page where we should be employing our own principles, we ignore them completely. Who says that "On January 4, the English language version of Wikipedia arrived at the 900,000 article mark." What is the source? How I know this was a legitimate contribution? For this page to be credible, all of these statements need to be sourced. This should not be hard as these announcements are typically made in an e-mail list, the Wiki zine, the signpost, etc. as I mentioned before, I tried to do this with the meta timeline, to go back and find sources, but it was a very difficult and time-consuming process. So please, do this when you add something. I almost think we should start reverting any edit that doesn't have a source.

® type things

show me 10 articles with ® used to designate trademarks and you'll have a better case, reverting... JoeSmack Talk 17:06, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Second language?

In Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination and Catalan Wikipedia put that the second language was Catalan, created in March of 2001. Is it false? Llull 10:09, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

In the Creation history there is Catalan as the second to be created. Llull 17:07, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Indeed it seems a "Spanish" and a French Wikipedia were set up together with the German one in March, 2001 [3]. But were any articles written there? What proofs are there? You should expand the article Catalan Wikipedia to the same level of detail as the article about the German Wikipedia. --LA2 22:16, 23 August 2006 (UTC)
Cronological facts:
  • Fri Mar 16 01:24:53 UTC 2001 Jimmy Wales says here that he wants to set up some alternative language wikipedias.
  • Fri Mar 16 01:38:55 UTC 2001 Jimmy Wales says he has created deutsche.wikipedia.com wich has only a few words in english.
  • 01:41, 17 març 2001 (Sat Mar 17 01:41 UCT 2001) an anonymous makes the first contribution in catalan to the catalan wikipedia.
  • 13:37, 30. Mai 2001 (May 30 2001) first contribution in german in the german wikipedia.
Therefore: I would write in the article that the first domain reserved for a non english wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com followed in the same day by the catalan and probably also the french and the spanish (how could the anonymous contribute some hours after in the catalan wikipedia if it was still not created?), and the first colaboration in a non-English wikipedia was an article in catalan.
In any case, catalan wikipedia can not be created in may as it says in the article, because in march it already had some editions.
To sum up, I would rewrite the paragraph as follows:

Early in Wikipedia's development, it began to expand internationally. The first domain reserved for a non-English Wikipedia was deutsche.wikipedia.com (on 16 March 2001)[1], followed in the same day by the Catalan and probably also the French and the Spanish. The first contribution in a non-English article, however, is in the Catalan Wikipedia [2]. The first reference of the French Wikipedia is from 23 March[3] and then in May 2001 it followed a wave of new language versions in Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. They were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian[4][5] In September, a further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made.[6] At the end of the year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbian versions were announced.[7]

Please, make any suggestion/correction if you find any mistake or you can improve the style. If you feel it's ok, please, change the article with this more accurate description of the events. Thanks.--Xtv - (my talk) - (que dius que què?) 23:55, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

review all external links

I have upgraded all external links to <ref> tags so that we can see all of these external links together and ask ourselves if they are appropriate and scholarly. -- 75.24.111.205 11:51, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Current censorship of Wikipedia in the world

I'd like to ask a (perhaps) simple question: is Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) only censored (blocked) in PRC? --Fitzwilliam 04:38, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

15th January

This diff is curious (and, while true, I've reverted it for the moment). The 15th of January is commonly known as "Wikipedia day" - this is when (as the article said) Wikipedia was formally founded. Further information and context can be added, but this date needs to be recognised. Just a thought, but if a mini-timeline could be created on the first days of Wikipedia, that would be a better substitute for removing the date entirely. Cormaggio @ 13:47, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

First inkling of a WikiPedia ?

WikiWikiWeb:WikiPedia here?


My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- JimboWales

Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- WardCunningham

(see also: WikiWikiWeb, Wiki, Ward Cunningham, Jimbo Wales

-- Kim Bruning 21:31, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Edits by possible banned editor and other vandalisers

I reverted a set of edits made on August 3 by someone editing from IP 75.26.2.210. This address is similar to others that have been used by a banned editor who has been very active on Wikipedia lately. We need a mini-project to find reliable sources for the history of Wikipedia and then this article needs to cite those sources. Since Wikipedia should always "look outward", it might be best to move this article to a different wiki. --JWSchmidt 05:00, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
      I reverted a couple of edits too regarding name-changes. Can this page be protected so that access to new users like me and others are restricted? -- Zurcech Lordum 09:30, 23 November 2006

1,500,000th article

The one-millionth article is linked from the article. What's article #1,500,000? --zenohockey 22:42, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Kanab Ambersnail. Pepsidrinka 13:32, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

The facts according to Wikipedia press releases and page histories

I'd like to point out, for the benefit of those working on this article and related articles, that according to Wikipedia's own first three press releases, until 2004--including two press releases that I didn't have anything at all to do with--I was billed as a founder of Wikipedia. See:

Also, until 2004 or 2005, all of the articles about me, Wikipedia, History of Wikipedia, and even Jimmy gave me billing as co-founder of Wikipedia. Just thought it might be useful to point this out for those who weren't aware of it. --Larry Sanger 20:49, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Links of interest

To the best of my knowledge, I was first described as co-founder of Wikipedia back in September 2001 by The New York Times. That was also my description in Wikipedia's own press releases from 2002 until 2004. With my increasing distance from the project, and as it grew in the public eye, however, some of those associated with the project have found it convenient to downplay and even deny my crucial, formative involvement. In fact, in the early years of the project, my role was not in dispute at all.

The following links have come to light, and they should dispel much of the confusion:

http://www.larrysanger.org/roleinwp.html

--Larry Sanger 22:56, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Those of us who were there...

I was a member of the core group of editors back in 2001 - there were only about 30 of us. I arrived in early Sept.

Frankly - to assert that Larry was not a co-founder of the Pedia is patently absurd. Jimbo was the driving force behind the Internet-based encyclopedia concept, which became Nupedia. Larry proposed and convinced Jimbo that a wiki-based concept was worthwhile.

Larry remains (in my opinion) the single most important individual in the history of the actual Wikipedia, and his structural and philosophical influence remains apparent to this day. (FWIW, IMHO the second most important individual is Daniel Meyer whose name is completely absent from this history.) Jimbo is certainly up there, but from personal experience of what actually transpired in the micro and macro evolution of the site, this is how I see it.

Myabe one day I'll write my own verion of events. Manning 02:03, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. That's how I see it too. -- Derek Ross | Talk 00:59, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Were you really there? What you are saying contradicts what Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia said on the bomis talk page[4] Jörg Vogt 23:58, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

oh actually you might be right, according to wikipedia's 2001 website [5]. Jörg Vogt 00:02, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
Was I really there? That's easily verified by examining the archived version. I even created the Wikiproject concept Manning 01:57, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

This is pretty bad...

This article is not too good a resource, it's missing some vital facts. When did Wikipedia switch from usemod to phase 2 to phase 3? What else happened in 2006?(come on, I know at least a few thigs did, with the election and all) -- Chris is me (u/c/t) 16:01, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Indeed. A lot of things are missing from the 2006 section, and I'm not sure the sections are arranged as nicely as they could be anyway. I've stuck a to-do list at the top of the page, and I'll work on the things in it at some point – Qxz 09:47, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
I've added brief details of the Phase I/II/III transitions, based on information in Wikipedia – Qxz 10:40, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

German Version

Was looking at the german version of this article and it seemed that the way it started out is a lot better than ours, or at least contains more info. See here. Unfortunately I'm next to useless at reading german (even though my family comes from germany... drat!), so can't see exactly how much better it is or easily add parts in from there. But am posting here in the hopes a german reader could? Mathmo Talk 13:44, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes the german version of most things is better. Normally I would volunteer, but I am having computer problems at the momentJörg Vogt 03:59, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Xrefer

is claimed (in it's article) to have been one of Wikipedia's main competitors as an open access encyclopedia between 2000 and 2003. Is That true? Would it fit in the article? -- 172.158.230.125 01:41, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

2006 fundraiser

Hi. There was a fundraiser in late 2006 or early 2007, I'm not sure when exactly. it raised over a million dolars US for the foundation. Other fundraisers are mentioned, why not this one? Should it be added? Please respond. Thanks. AstroHurricane001(Talk+Contribs+Ubx) 17:23, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Daniel Meyer

I've raised this before, but it's worth raising again. As I've said, I would rate Larry Sanger as the single most important person in the history of the 'pedia.

However, the second most important person is (in my opinion) Daniel Meyer, also known as Maveric149. Why his name is missing from this article eludes me completely. Daniel was the leader of the "second wave" of editors who arrived early in 2002, and his handiwork is evident in almost every aspect of the current 'pedia's architecture. Daniel effectively ran the entire site for nearly a year after Larry's exit. Those of us who were here then can vouch for that. Manning 04:38, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Please do not defy Jimbo. Nothing good will come of it. Its surprising how many people try and pull down the great man, he deserves the credit, Plus he could delete any one of us out of existence you know.Jörg Vogt 10:44, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm not trying to "pull Jimbo" down. Jimbo was certainly crucial to Wikipedia - he provided the money and the hardware. But he was really not involved in the 'pedia's day-to-day development for the first two years. My own involvement diminished in mid 2002 and has remained 'infrequent' since that time, but I know what went on before that, as I was heavily involved (a fact easily verified by checking the archived versions). Larry was the chief driving figure prior to February 2002. After that, Daniel Meyer became the chief driving force (without ever being formally appointed to the role I might add). Manning 01:53, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
His name is spelled Mayer. Note the Dec 2006 entry "In late February 2004 a coordinated new look for the Main Page appeared. On February 25, the listing of important overview articles, was replaced by a single link to Template:WikipediaTOC. Hand-chosen entries for the Daily Featured Article, Anniversaries, In the News, and Did You Know rounded out the new look. On February 26, 2004, User:maveric149 (Daniel Mayer) implemented the first entries of an automated archive for the Selected anniversaries which appear on the Main Page. This feature updates daily on the Main Page of the English Wikipedia." I happen to know this because I assisted mav on an anonymous basis in the early days of Selected Anniversaries; mav is the one who encouraged me to get a username. --Ancheta Wis 23:50, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Nature study

hey all, i was doing a project on wikipedia recently and in the process i came across somethin i thought i should bring to your attention

unless nature.com messed up it's page i think our page is wrong

i added the totals up in excel and the totals are different instead of 123/162 for brittanica/wiki respectively i came to the totals of 121/157 for britt/wiki respectively along with the average per page, wiht the posted being 2.92/3.86 per page (brit/wiki) compaired to the calculated 2.95/3.82(brit/wiki) per article that i calculated

let me kno if this is all confusin or what not and i'll try 2 better explain it... peace:)Ancientanubis, talk 04:25, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Naming conv.

Shouldn't the name be [The] history of wikipedia, because ther is just the one and only. Peacekeeper II 08:42, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Refactor of page

I've restructured the article and transferred existing information. Hopefully people'll like it.

The article as it existed was mostly a few sections on specific themes, pluus a list of "things that happened". As a pure list, there was little cohesion, it was hard to get a sense of development in any given area, and left another few years it would just be a stack of unconnected miscellany bordering on breaching WP:NOT.

What I've done is this:

  1. Founding of Wikipedia is in one section. Before it was in two sections, the concept origins being at the bottom of the article, the rest at the top.
  2. Added "organization" as a section in the overview.
  3. Summaries of main changes in each year in one short section
  4. Detailed changes grouped by theme, so that activity and growth in any given area (size, foundation activities etc) can be easily followed.
  5. 3 significant missing items added -- the policy creations of late 2005 were all in the wake of Brandt and Seigenthaler, so this is noted; the creation of WP:BLP was also in response but omitted; and the use of Wikipedia as a source for the F1 trademark case was overlooked.
  6. Specific incidents are given a section to themselves
  7. Images are given a gallery "Wikipedia history in images", which adds impact and a resource, whilst ensuring they don't cause the rest of the page to comprise long thin columns.


I haven't actually changed the bulleted points from the original, except when information was missing (above), and so there is still some stuff to do:

  1. Add "notable people" - left as placeholder as I don't know enough to add this.
  2. Probably heavily brevify the incidents sections, to a short paragraph each, since each of these are well documented in their own articles.
  3. Add missing info re 2000 and 2001
  4. Trim down long lists and summarize in prose form. Much of this doesn't need precise dates, or bullet format. Normal textual format as per most articles might be better for some parts. But I haven't touched this so far, just left it "as it was".
  5. Assorted other cleanup


Hope it gets a thumbs up!

FT2 (Talk | email) 18:28, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Conrad Burns

It seems clear to me that the Conrad Burns incident was in early 2006, not January 1, 2007, so I am taking out the line about the "two similar incidents" in the 2007 section of "Historical overview by year" — the other being the Rick Jelliffe incident — because the juxtaposition is not appropriate. They are both listed in the "Controversies" section.--76.220.203.140 08:04, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:" namespace links

I am pretty sure that we are not supposed to be pointing to "Wikipedia:" namespace pages such as WP:BLP as a WikiLink because "Wikipedia:" stuff does not get copied when the encyclopedia is exported. We are supposed to, if needed, make them a URL.--76.220.203.140 08:27, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Makes sense. The link to BLP is valid (verification of claim) but you're right, I missed that it needs to be a perm URL, not a wikilink. Thanks for catching that one! FT2 (Talk | email) 10:59, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Edit questions

The following have been added, I've moved them here to discuss:

  • "November 2005: The Bogdanov Affair demonstrates how Wikipedia suffers from many of the same problems as Usenet."

My concerns here are as to whether these are handled appropriately. If they are, then I'd put them back in, but I want to discuss and check first. FT2 (Talk | email) 18:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)


As promised I have checked these again:

1. The Bogdanov Affair seems not to have been a major issue for Wikipedia. It was a major POV war, but POV wars are ten a penny. Wikipedia itself was not in the media over it, nor did the Affair center around Wikipedia. It doesnt look like it "demonstrated" anything except that POV warriors come here, too. I can't find sources saying it was memorable in Wikipedia's history.

2. Much of the former is non-neutral. Page blanking and courtesy blanking is not, as implied, a wrongdoing in most cases. banned users will naturally continue to grow as Wikipedia expands and more people use it, this doesn't show anything unusual. The comment on BRD is an assertation, alleging admin bias and misuse of powers, but it needs citing, or citing that there is a notable controversy or minority view sufficiently relevant for a history of Wikipedia. And so on. As it stands this seems to contradict WP:NPOV.

Comments? FT2 (Talk | email) 18:11, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm also a bit concerned at some of the recent trimming. Articles have to stand on their own merits, to an extent. They need citing, not just reference to other articles presumed to have the cites (removal of cites from Taner Akçam, Microsoft, Essjay and Benoit) and they need some actual description (more than just "The congressional staffer edits to Wikipedia biographies of politicians comes to light"). Also, Nature is not notable. Its one of many studies into Wikipedia accuracy, so what? It only deserves a mention because it followed on from the Seigenthaler incident, and is an epilogue to that story. I'd likle to revert several of these edits. FT2 (Talk | email) 19:27, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Okay, try that. I've renamed the scandal to "political aides" and made clear it's 2 events ("In a separate but similar incident...") . That way it covers both cases in one item. FT2 (Talk | email) 19:42, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, the "flip side of the coin" paragraph is a bunch of kibbles and bits. But I still think that a coherent paragraph can be written using at least some of these items to show the official deletionist half of the dynamic equilibrium that is the actual Wikipedia process.--76.203.48.177 20:24, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
I guess that what this line of thought might lead to is a slightly deeper look at semi-protection and its actual usage as well. The initial concept was that it would be used on 30 articles but now it is more than 1000 and it seems like that number can only grow.--76.203.48.177 20:48, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

I think that the huge footnote for the congressional staffer thing is ugly, but in time I will simply acclimate to it.--76.203.48.177 20:44, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

If you're trying to describe changes to the balance and attitudes of Wikipedia culture, then thats tricky. With so many active editors, a lot of it will either be statistics, or OR... and it's hard to tell whether (for example) deletions and protections are because of growth, because of attitude change, because of whatever reason. if you can think of a way to document how Wiki culture's changed with evidence, I'd say fine, but I don't know what you're trying to show, or where we might get information that isn't just personal guesswork what various stats might mean. And yeah - I agree on the footnote. A better layout wouldnt hurt, but at least its in a note where it belongs, not the text. Should we use a footnote table, maybe?? FT2 (Talk | email) 21:10, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay - take a look at the footnote now! Better? FT2 (Talk | email) 21:22, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

When I talk about the process and, for instance, the proliferation of semi-protected pages, the Katefan0/Gator1 outings and list of banned users, I suppose I am really talking about the Wikipedia community and the process. Like it or not, that is what many lighter news articles about Wikipedia seem to focus on. Even though Jimbo still calls the shots, is there anything that can be said about the community while being NPOV, NOR and all that? You can talk about isolated incidents where Wikipedia played a role and you can talk about the technology, but I have to wonder if anything else has spontaneously qualitatively changed about the community since, say, 2004. By "spontaneously", I guess I mean without necessarily being embodied in policy. Perhaps each person's experience is unique, but I question things like:

  • What drives deletion? Is is different now than in 2004?
  • Is there anything different about anonymity now? Certainly the community seems more methodical about dealing with potential libel and defamation.
  • Has anyone had, perhaps, a hospitalization, divorce or death because of their wikiholism? I ask that because of the similarities between the Scientology, Objectivism, hippie communes and the Wikipedia community in that the real power is concentrated in one or few central figures and their entourage and such environments often breed such outcomes.
  • Is the current publicity changing the kind of new Wikipedian that becomes active? Some who have left claim that the vast majority of Wikipedians have a variety of strange hidden agendas of one sort or another that drive their participation beyond just building the encyclopedia..

So I guess I am looking for trends in the community, if they can be discerned. I noticed that WP:100K has at the end of it a hard-hitting reality check. It will be interesting to see which there are more of a year from now: Featured Articles or semi-protected articles. The current trends seem to favor the latter.--76.203.48.177 23:30, 23 July 2007 (UTC)


Some interesting questions there. A lot of them are the kind we can think about, if we put them in a different context.
Suppose we were writing "History of Denmark", and we wanted for completeness to comment on the state of the community. We ask if the culture of modern day Denmark was changing or different. We would be reluctant to guess, and we'd probably not make it a central part of the national history, but it's relevant. We would not put in cites from one or two polls or individual emigrants views. But if there were reliable surveys and stufdies on social metrics, we might summarize some facts from those. We wouldn't try to sensationalize or editorialize though, by filling it out with partial information.
Thats kind of where I'd be at here, too. Any use? FT2 (Talk | email) 02:47, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Claims reworded

We don't know enough to cast an impression on semi-protection, so I've reworded it with the facts - it has proven more successful or popular than anticipated originally.

In the same vein I've removed the unsourced and probably non-notable assertion that "Wikipedia's name becomes associated with the word truthiness".

Last, I've reworded the clumsy wording about use of redirects instead of bio articles. FT2 (Talk | email) 09:14, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

More specific please

Quote from article: 'On March 19, following a vote, the Main Page of the English language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years.'

March 19 of what year? It needs filling in. Lradrama 19:21, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

The monster footnote is growing... GROWING....

This is the "History of Wikipedia" article! The Congressional staffer edits to Wikipedia has its own article. We now have an entire infobox embedded within the footnotes about the Congressmen whose Wikipedia biographies where edited. This is painful. I feel that the incident deserves little more than a wikilink and a timeframe (early to mid 2006) in this History article.--75.37.12.168 19:59, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Can't completely disagree there. If you want, might be best to suggest a wording for the bullet and footnote here, and discuss it briefly, makes it easier to discuss? FT2 (Talk | email) 21:15, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Userboxes?

Would the massive growth in userboxes and the so-called "Great 2006 New Year's Day Userbox Purge" and the subsequent deletion of a lot of userboxes be worth mentioning in the 2006 and 2007 sections of the article? - • The Giant Puffin • 22:38, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I object. The userboxes conflicts never managed to get back out to the Real World and has little or nothing to do with encyclopedic content creation. That makes the userbox thing a self-reference best avoided in this article.--75.37.12.168 22:49, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
With respect, disagree. The subject is "History of Wikipedia". Since Wikipedia is a community and an encyclopedia, that means that the history of wikipedia as a community is an intrinsic and integral aspect of the article. The things which were notable as a community are part of Wikipedia's history, since almost every reliable source on Wikipedia structure emphasizes the integral nature of the community, its structure, consensus, and culture. Those are notable aspects too.
It isn't all about article count and functionality enhancements, so to speak. Much of what is notable in the History of Wikipedia in the community aspect, isn't about "encyclopedic article creation". Documenting the cultural aspects of Wikipedia's history where it can be reliably documented, is relevant too - trends, notable major policy changes, notable internal regulatory or sentiment changes, notable internal communal matters, new project areas, and so on are all potentially notable aspects too, if they can be reliably evidenced and are verifiable. FT2 (Talk | email) 01:12, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

A mild concern

To the IP user on this article...

I have some mild concerns about the edits you're adding in some places. A lot of the edits are good, but some give quite a non-neutral effect and give rise to concern. Some examples:


  1. Addition of "In a small internal controversy, the maturity of Wikipedian volunteers is challenged" History of Wikipedia [6]
    WP:OR, this is a personal view.
  2. Addition of The Wikipedia Story "whether or not Wikipedia is a valuable source of knowledge, or if it is a symptom of mediocrity and the devaluation of expertise and research ... Wales suggests that he has no more authority within his organization than the Queen of England does within hers — an asssertion that some might take exception with"
    WP:OR, WP:WEASEL - opinion.
  3. Addition of "The worldwide project, with over one million registered user accounts, continues to produce about one English "featured article" per day." [italics in original] to Essjay controversy where its relevance and effect is rather questionable at best [7]
    WP:NPOV WP:POINT - Low relevance, undue weight and non-neutral impression in the context, and pointy.
    I guess I was trying to put the importance of the whole incident into perspective with something Important enough to give a sense of finality and discourage trivial media references to the Essjay controversy from the continuing debate over the credibility of Wikipedia from creeping back into the timeline. I suppose I am being a bit of a realist or perhaps a pessimist, but it seems to me that the rate of 1 FA per day is going to hold for the next several years and that WP:100K is a long way off.--76.203.126.39 01:13, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
  4. Addition of "Jimmy Wales continues to intervene in biographies as he sees fit with "courtesy blankings" or editing on behalf of celebrities who contact him nicely such as he did for Bianca Jagger about her past dating of Billy Joel. This list of administrators who continue to revert, block and ignore anyone that they do not like continues to grow and the list of banned users continues to grow." to History of Wikipedia [8]
    WP:NPOV, some of these are factually correct but leave a non-neutral impression, for example the ban list might grow simply as the community grows, as Wikipedia becomes more popular, or even as a quality control measure (less tolerance for gamesters). But as stated, it implies a quite different meaning.
  5. Addition of "The Bogdanov Affair demonstrates how Wikipedia suffers from many of the same problems as Usenet" to History of Wikipedia. [9]
    WP:OR WP:NPOV - Affair doesn't appear to show anything of the kind, when examined.
  6. And others I haven't got to yet, probably...


The number of good quality edits added far outweighs these, though :) However, I'm thinking it might be worth taking extra care to keep "personal interpretation" and making points, out of such edits, when it's unsure if those are neutrally presented and relevant.

Anyhow, Hopefully drawing it to attention is enough, in which case, let me know, and thanks! :)

FT2 (Talk | email) 10:39, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The Tim Pierce incident was covered in Incident archives 184 and 187. Pierce was an instructor with an MBA at NIU. Zoe draws out some of the instructors reasonsing in the earlier archive. Jimbo had already handled it over the phone and nobody blogged about it. Zoe left the project on the notion that "vandalism is evil" has no exceptions. I assume that User:Georgewilliamherbert/PierceLetter was actually sent. I guess the point is that when it comes to a conflict between "building the encyclopedia" and education, education sometimes wins. I tend to view it as the need to preserve the Foundation's 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity status as sometimes resulting in a non-intuitive outcome. Maybe there is some other large point is demonstrates or maybe it is just a tempest in a teapot. Any ideas?--76.203.126.39 01:06, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't think it's notable, honestly. The only really solid sources for it are basically, that people on Wikipedia (Wales, Zoe etc) say it happened and they have spoken to him, and documenting his agreement it happened, so I guess that can be considered verifiable. But a teacher asks his students to modify articles to show them it can be changed, and the impact is Wales speaks to him, an administrator writes to him, and there is some discussion of editors who think he was out of line? Not really the big picture. This (as noted on ANI 184/197) is not completely uncommon, and it just doesn't seem a big part of Wiki history even for that one year. No long term effects, nobody left Wikipedia, no scandals, no media reports.....
Regarding FA's, the stats aren't really anything to do with Essjay or the controversy. Trying to make a point with FA stats as "heres something really important so don't put as much focus on this controversy" isn't really workable. There's a different mindset for encyclopedias as for media reporting. In the latter one documents anything interesting and relevant, and tries to direct attention more. In the former one focusses on encyclopedic approaches, "is this important/notable/verifiable to put in". Essjay had zero to do with FA statistics nor do the stats shed any light on the Essjay controversy. Just report Essjay's controversy, keep to whats notable and important for an encyclopedia article on it, and let it go :) FT2 (Talk | email) 08:46, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Time of creation

In the user preferences, under the "Date and time" tab, I notice the example date is the same day Wikipedia is said to have gone online (January 15, 2001). Can anyone verify if the example time (16:12 UTC) is indeed the time at which the site was created? Samuel Grant 16:13, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Merging ("The Wikipedia Story")

I added content from the now redirected here The Wikipedia Story based on this closure, SqueakBox 21:49, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


(added with above not being seen):

I've removed this section.

The article itself was AFD'ed and made into a redirect (note: not redirect and merge).

This was a 1/2 hour TV documentary on WIkipedia. There have been literally hundreds of analyses of Wikipedia in the media. No notability for this specific one is claimed, and certainly doesn't seem to justify the extensive recap and analysis of it.

Whatever 3rd parties have to say on Wikipedia's history, can be added to the article and sourced. We might need a section "Third party analyses of Wikipedia's history" too, perhaps. But we almost certainly don't need plot and content recaps on individual documentaries. FT2 (Talk | email) 22:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Did you read the afd closure comment which clearly allows for merging. I'll trevert, please can we get further input, SqueakBox 22:38, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
Further input'd be good.
To me, merge means, content deemed useful (by article/topic editors) is by and large kept. So for example, if the interview contains a statement that Wikipedia was created over pizza in New Mexico, then that's maybe a fact that would be kept in "founding of Wikipedia". A subsection is a different thing. Creating a new and distinct subsection for the merged text is a bit different. It says, this documentary is notable enough in the context of Wikipedia history, to have its own subsection, not just to be used as a source for facts and cites. It's the latter view I'm disagreeing with.
Does that help clarify? (And I've tweaked the section title here so in time to come we and others can easily find it). FT2 (Talk | email) 23:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
I hear your points but would rather wait until others comment before clarifying my own thoughts on the matter (which certainly arent fixed on this occasion), SqueakBox 23:47, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough. Do you want to 3O it, or RFC, or do you think we'll get enough good input without those? My own feeling is, there are other things in the article that we need more feedback on too, like overall is it balanced and are the individual sections well balanced and checked or are they just "random points in a list"? I wouldn't mind seeing a short list of questions later on for this article, if you're agreeable; I don't think this is likely to be the only question where more input would help. FT2 (Talk | email) 01:31, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
What is notable about a 1/2 hour TV documentary on Wikipedia? I don't understand.  Mr.Guru  talk  03:01, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Nothing that I can see. It doesn't seem to be interesting on its own. If it can't be used to source any new information, I suggest removing mention of it entirely and making sure that it is listed at WP:PRESS. - BanyanTree 07:48, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I suggest shortening it. This looks bad in mainspace to have such a long paragraph on a short documentory.  Mr.Guru  talk  17:42, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
I commented it out of mainspace.[10] It needs to be drastically shortened.  Mr.Guru  talk  17:51, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Enciclopedia libre

Is the 2002 incident better described as "forking" or "breaking away" of a large number of editors of Spanish Wikipedia?

The sources seem to describe it as breaking away -- forking doesn't quite seem to capture the same sense of it. Comments? FT2 (Talk | email) 09:12, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

From earlier archives

I've summarized these here as they might still be useful: * Resources: m:Wikipedia timeline, Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people, and Wikipedia:Wikipedians in order of arrival.

  • There were three Slashdot mentions in 2001: two minor mentions on March 5 and March 30, 2001, and then a prominent pointer to a story on the community-edited technology and culture website Kuro5hin on July 26.

FT2 (Talk | email) 23:25, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

WikiWix

What's happenning with WikiWix and Linterweb? Wikipedia is linking to WikiWix, WikiWix is advertising Linterweb Wikipedia CD's, and Linterwebs' Wikilink is a redirect to this page, with no further info about them. Wikipedia itself seems to have no information on WikiWix, and when I created a page on it with what little info I could find on the web, it was successfully created, appeared on WikiWix itself as a new page, and then got eliminated and disappeared even from my ow activity history (I have it saved to disk). Since it's unlikely that I was the first person to try creating this page, does this mean that pages on a possible wikipedia affiliate are being censored?

Surely it's a fundamental principle of WikiPedia that it doesn't censor information relating to itself?

Maybe there's an innocent explanation. ErkDemon 22:44, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

The Mysterious Wikiwix: Affiliated With Wikipedia?
The Wikiwix Wikiopedia stub page has gone, along with its history and its entry on my user history, which means that here's no obvious way to find that it ever existed. I did, however, manage to trace this:
"22:01, 18 August 2007 Splash (Talk | contribs) deleted "Wikiwix" (silly article)"
It's not listed on the editor's activity page, so presumably this was done as an admin-level action rather than as a conventional edit? ErkDemon 11:54, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Jimbo Wales Pic

Anybody else dislike the pic of Jimbo in this article? I think it's intended to make him look like a forward-thinking visionary, but it ends up looking pompous. There are several better pics at Jimmy Wales. Can we use one of those (or another good one from elsewhere) here? --Nricardo 18:56, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Support. FT2 (Talk | email) 15:11, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikiality and "The Colbert Report"

Do you think that Wikiality and The Colbert Report should be mentioned in the article. Seeing as this show has had quite some history with Wikipedia, I think it is probably worthy enough to be included. ISD 10:50, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Precedents

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was one of the first dynamic online encyclopedias (although with a peer reviewed model), developed between 1995-1998 [11]. I'm aware of the size of the article, so I haven't gone and put it in, but wonder whether this and precedents need more attention (perhaps at the expense of some of the less notable history/incidents on this page).Mostlyharmless 04:01, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

History article construction

I have created the secrtions for "up to 2006" and "2007", for editors to list as they see fit, matters that might warrant a mention in the article, or relate to the History of Wikipedia.

Hopefully this will be a Good Idea -- there are many matters and if left they get overlooked, but if added immediately the article becomes just a list. Hopefully listing them here will mean that over time we can consider and check consensus what is genuinely significant, and what is not. All items need sourcing and explaining. FT2 (Talk | email) 23:05, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Possible omitted items from earlier years

Possible updates for 2007

  1. [12] New York Times admits to same problem in its archives that Wikipedia has noted - old pages can preserve outdated information, especially for BLP purposes. FT2 (Talk | email) 23:05, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
  2. Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2007 August 26 -- BLAODN deleted, after many xFDs. Final argument was on the basis that these 99 humor pages, some of the oldest on Wikipedia, had become a "monument to vandalism" and that denyying glorification of vandalism outweighed humor value. FT2 (Talk | email) 23:05, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
  3. [13] South African govt official "arrested on charges of vandalism" and "suspended from his duties" after repeated deletion from Wikipedia's entry on South Africa's HIV crisis. FT2 (Talk | email) 23:09, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
  4. China reblocked [14] FT2 (Talk | email) 21:03, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
  5. Trust becomes a focus, first with Flagged revisions, then Wikiscanner, then trusted edits analysis:
    • Wikipedia:Flagged revisions begins to be discussed, as Mediawiki approaches testing of flagged revisions on the German Wikipedia. Initially some mainstream media misreport this as "Wikipedia abandons open editing" [15]; these reports are later corrected.[16][17] FT2 (Talk | email) 23:05, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
    • Wikiscanner emerges, a number of well known companies and bodies embarrassingly exposed as editing their own articles. Seems that heads roll in some cases. (eg [18][19][20][21][22][23]) FT2 (Talk | email) 21:03, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
    (And I seem to remember at least one freedom of information lawsuit to find who made some edits in one case) [24] FT2 (Talk | email) 20:42, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
    • Software to detect trusted edits is designed. [25] FT2 (Talk | email) 21:03, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
  6. The community sanctions noticeboard is removed -- deemed an experiment that failed. Its intent was to allow focus on serious cases;in practice it marginalized them away from mainstream discussion. (Signpost Volume 3, Issue 42, "Community_sanction_noticeboard_closed")
  7. First "adminbot" (automated program to be granted administrative access) is created after searching inquiry over the risks and benefits. (Signpost Volume 3, Issue 42, "Bot_is_approved_to_delete_redirects")
  8. Wikimedia commons reaches 2 million files (Signpost Volume 3, Issue 42)
  9. Landmark case - defamation case against Wikimedia in France dismissed. [26]
  10. John Wiley incident - book publisher found to have copied text from Wikipedia verbatim without attribution in one of their books. The same publisher had previously "touched off a fair use brouhaha earlier this year when they threatened to sue a blogger who had reproduced a chart and a table (fully attributed) from one of their journals". [27] FT2 (Talk | email) 11:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
  11. Debate over "secret information" and its various corollaries.
  12. Veropedia launches; same article covers the debate over COI editing which seems to stabilize somewhat [28] FT2 (Talk | email) 14:55, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
  13. Rollback is discussed for non-admins, and page cration for anons. Wikipedia:Rollback for non-administrators Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anonymous page creation. FT2 (Talk | email) 14:55, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
  14. The Carolyn Doran COO news breaks Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-12-17/Former COO -- Jimmy states that the audit shows (at present) no problems but any losses will be made good from his pocket. (his talk page) FT2 (Talk | email) 14:55, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
  15. A lot of academic research on reliability and such - see Reliability of Wikipedia. FT2 (Talk | email) 14:55, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
  16. Jimbo testifies on Wikipedia at senate (also info on founding of WP) [29] -- senate response [30]. FT2 (Talk | email) 00:07, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
  17. Citizendium chooses licence - Sanger clarifies view of Wikipedia. [31] FT2 (Talk | email) 17:46, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
  18. See summary of 2007 in "signpost" (3 part series) Jan 2008. FT2 (Talk | email) 03:04, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Possible updates for 2008

  1. Jan 21 - Wikipedias longest lived hoax article, on a purported outdated term in Hinduism, finaly deleted after 3.5 years of "remarkable" stability. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Brahmanical See. FT2 (Talk | email) 03:04, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

"the greatest story ever told"

should redirect to this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.182.171.164 (talk) 17:33, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

BYOP/BYOB

BYOP: Some paintballers might know because it means br your own paint. If the feild lets you thats what their website might say sor their add.

BYOB: Fans of BBQ's or Fams of System of a Down might know what this is. Bring you own beer or Bring your own Bombs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ben608 (talk • contribs) 20:26, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Disagreement and roles - section title

Extra views sought. We have hit a slight disagreement. The section on Sanger and Wales disagreement is fine, but the title of it is the subject of reversion and disagreement. [32]

  • I've selected "Disagreement over early roles of Wales and Sanger"; the section is not about their early roles, which would be part of describing how Wikipedia operated and who did what.... it's specifically about the disagreement over their early roles. To my mind just calling it "roles of..." is a mis-titling, it doesn't actually say what the section is about.
  • QuackGuru has selected "Early roles of Wales and Sanger". I can't speak for his view, but if I understand his edit summary, his view in his own words is "undue weight, shorten long header, keep it simple, this is an encyclopedia and not a tabloid print".

My concern is that this is a subsection specifically on their disagreement. To not describe it as such is unhelpful and misleads users reading the contents (And, "early roles of X" is not an incident, whereas "disagreement between X and Y" is, and is the subject of the section.)

Quackguru - your comments welcomed? And anyone else - comments and views which works best? FT2 (Talk | email) 20:46, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

No comments per se, but this might be an amusing read...
I changed "founder of Wikipedia" to "founder of Wikimedia Foundation". The former is a subject of some dispute, of course, with Larry Sanger going around spreading his self-appointed title, and we don't need to take a stand on that. In this context, the important thing is Wikimedia, and it is undisputed that I am the (sole) founder of the nonprofit organization. (Larry had been fired long before the Foundation started.)--Jimbo Wales 15:06, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Huh?

The concept of gathering all of the world's knowledge in a single place goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon - how is that relevant to Wikipedia? Wikipedia is not based on that concept - indeed, it has policies which preclude it doing any such thing. -PinkEllie 11:37, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

It was added earlier by an editor, as a precedent. The notion of a collection of information led to encyclopedias that led to wikipedia. Thats not about policy, its about context. FT2 (Talk | email) 21:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


Article review

I've reviewed the article and made a few edits, summarized below:

  1. The header disambiguation link to the Wikipedia story has been improved. The page Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story now disambiguates betyween the encyclopedia article here and the community's page on the documentary in project space. The DAB link is no longer needed and gives this documentary undue prominence. It's now safely moved to "see also" where all other project space resources are shown.
  2. Reinstate both claims about origins of idea. Both are cited, and the text used to characterize and describe this rather than assert one or the other.
  3. Remove statement that Sanger attributed departure to trolls. Sources at the time and in the article clearly show he stated at the time that it was due to loss of financial support for the position and other reasons.
  4. Remove apparently pointless comment " With Devouard as Chair and ArbCom operating, the word "troll" ceases to have any operational meaning (it was formerly defined by Wales)." -- if anyone can convincingly explain what this means and why it's encyclopedic, please reinstate.
  5. Checkuser - remove redundant/excess description that it's written in PHP (all of mediawiki is) and what a sockpuppet is (that can be looked up), and merge the references to keep the main article tight.
  6. Clarify what Nature's "refusal to apologize" to Brittanica was about.
  7. Wales/Sanger:
    • This section has been modified to push one viewpoint out of two, rather than both competing claims and their evidence (original version current version). I've reverted, but included the cites and information which were useful in the 'pushed' version.
    • In addition, that version cited many pages for Sanger's claims. These included revision history of talk pages, and of the Wikipedia article, press releases, and media publications. I've removed all the former -- the risk of a self-ref is huge. The talk pages and Wikipedia articles were edited by many people, so we would be insane to try and cite a specific Wikipedia page version or a poage revision history to "prove" any specific status quo was the case. (A specific diff would be different of course.) Press releases and media publications are likely to be fairly solid however, so I've used those instead, they're more reliable and all that's needed.
    • Fixed up cites on suggestion of the idea, as above in 1st section (see #2). And replace POV word "concedes" with neutral word "states" -- even though former is actually correct use in this context, it adds a "flavor" of POV. Better removed.
  8. China blocks - many occasions now. It's getting impractical to list them all in this article, so reword to note multiple occasions and that this section will list major ones one. See the existing subarticle for the full list.
  9. Minor edits - removing <small> etc

Diff of the above: [33]. FT2 (Talk | email) 23:01, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Self-ref and self-pub

Moved from User_talk:FT2:


please provide a reference

Please provide a reference (as long as it is not a self-ref) or the uncited material will be deleted and replaced with the previous version I added.[34] I believe a self-ref cannot be used to verify the text. Do you know if self-refs can be used for context purposes when the text has already been verified by a third-party ref? Thank you.  Mr.Guru  talk  18:30, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

This is an unusual case; the article is History of Wikipedia and the subject is a statement placed by Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia. So the first thing is, that this is possibly an extremely unusual case, since in most articles Wikipedia itself is not the subject of the article nor the location a notable claim was published. The main problem with Wikipedia as a source is that it can be edited by anyone. However its important to distinguish text in general, from diffs and permanent references, which cannot usually be edited after submission (or can only be edited in the same sense that an archive from The New York Times or the BBC can be, ie by illicit tampering with the website).
The purpose of WP:RS is to protect ourselves from two problems: 1/ placing reliance on content that is essentially freely modified, 2/ placing reliance on claims and assertations that are not visibly and long term/permanently agreed by some credible source as being their view. In this case several features seem to suggest this diff is a reliable source:
  1. The claim being made is that "Jimmy Wales asserts that Rosenfeld told him about wikis".
  2. The evidence is a permanent record of a wikipedia diff in which Jimmy Wales' account makes an edit containing that claim, as opposed to (say) a wikipedia current page that "anyone can edit". Wikipedia diffs are usually considered a reliable archive of things that Wikipedia editors did or did not add to the wiki as their own words and statements.
  3. The diff is acting as a primary source (ie, it requires no interpretation or synthesis (WP:OR) to obtain a meaning).
  4. The reliability of the source comes from the fact that the statement is in a permanent archive which I suspect by common agreement is considered reliable for such statements. You will see that the article Wikipedia contains similarly, cites from within Wikipedia. (Strictly these should be perm references and not just page links but the principle holds - the community appears to have considered them "reliable".)
Ordinarily the difficulty would be sourcing elsewhere, since one runs the risk that a seemingly-reliable 3rd party statement is in fact 'behind the scenes' sourced by the writer from Wikipedia itself. However as it happens, after a bit of digging we do in fact by chance seem to have a third party reliable source for this claim source and a few others; I'll add it to the article since in general if a factual statement can be cited without self-ref that's indeed usually preferable. But in general, I would feel that a diff on wikipedia is a reliable source for a claim that its creator wrote the words contained. if it comes up again, though, i'd be fine RFC'ing it, since it is a tricky and exceptional situation.
Thanks for the comment - I'll go edit that article now. FT2 (Talk | email) 19:01, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AHistory_of_Wikipedia&diff=167518610&oldid=167518141#Article_review
You wrote: In addition, that version cited many pages for Sanger's claims. These included revision history of talk pages, and of the Wikipedia article, press releases, and media publications. I've removed all the former -- the risk of a self-ref is huge. The talk pages and Wikipedia articles were edited by many people, so we would be insane to try and cite a specific Wikipedia page version or a [sic] poage revision history to "prove" any specific status quo was the case.
According to you we should not use any self-refs. You deleted the self-refs I added. The self-refs I added were only used for context purposes and not used to verify the text. However, you are attempting to use a self-ref to verify the text which you wrote, we would be insane to try and cite a specific Wikipedia page version or a poage [sic] revision history...
Hmmm.  Mr.Guru  talk  19:15, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Correct. There is a difference between a diff (which is the work of one specific person at one specific time) and a revision of an entire page (which is the work of many people up to that time).
We can only say one of three things really: - if we have a specific diff, we can reliably say "editor/person X said Y" (a primary source so we can state this with fair confidence). If we have a permanent page link we can only reliably say "on date X the article said Y" (but we can't know if that was representative of other versions of the page five minutes earlier or later, or if it was representative of others' views not recorded on that page). If we have a current page link we can't say a thing reliably since it might change within seconds.
The cites I removed were page cites. They can't attest to any actual fact since we have no evidence that the words appearing on the 5 December 200X version of a page were typed by Wales, even though it is a permanent version. They can't attest to what the "status quo" was since the diff of 5 December 200X might well be an abberation compared to that of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th or 7th. By contrast a specific diff does testify to the words of one specific person, at one specific point in time, effectively (the community seems to agree) permanently. Hopefully this explains. Your link was to an entire page attempting (as I recall) to use it to say "this proves X was the status quo". That's not reliable evidence for the claim. The replacement was to one specific persons words, a very different matter. FT2 (Talk | email) 19:28, 1 November 2007 (UTC)


Afterthought: You might want to re-read WP:V again, especially the two sections on self-published sources, and self-published sources in articles about themselves. My impression is these would have answered this question as well. If you still have questions can we move this to Talk:History of Wikipedia to keep it there for others? FT2 (Talk | email) 19:41, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

FT2 (Talk | email) 19:44, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Bad reference

I'm usually not one to complain about stuff, but This reference (note #8) from this article, is giberish and needs clean-up. Because of this I am adding the clean-up template. --AdVocare 20:24, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Okay! I think I've fixed the problem. However, if someone else could please check and make sure that everything is in good standing order that would be great. Please remove the "Clean-up" tag once you've done this. Thank you! --AdVocare 20:39, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Jimbo's visage

May I suggest to replace the photo? He does not look so pompous in real life. `'Míkka 17:39, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Dubious

The rate of article creation is decreasing, even if the quantity of articles increases. The statistics claimed in the article demonstrate this: 1,000 to 10,000 is a ten-fold increase in only a few months whereas 20,000 to 100,000 is only a five-fold increase. Moreover, Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth purports to demonstrate how article creation is slowing by several metrics. Madcoverboy (talk) 16:49, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Section "Other notable occurences"

I see this section rather outlandish, for a number of reasons. Below are my suggestions for its subsections. Opinions, please. `'Míkka>t 20:04, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Sanger

The topic of "Early roles of Wales and Sanger" in fact belongs to section "Founding of Wikipedia". If there is an opinion that this long musing is indeed necessary, I suggest to move it into a separate article and put a brief summary into "Founding of Wikipedia". Otherwise the item is IMO bearing quite undue weight in this general overview of wikipedia's history. `'Míkka>t 20:04, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Blocking

This one is a rather independent thread of wikipedia's history and I suggest to promote the subsection one level up. `'Míkka>t 20:04, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Also: Uzbek Wikipedia is banned since 10 January, 2008 in Uzbekistan :( It is the second blocking. Abdullais4u (talk) 11:28, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Oldest wikipedian

How old is the oldest user of Wikipedia, who has a user page? Neduvelilmathew (talk) 05:50, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Isnt it Jimmy Wales? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.34.37.64 (talk) 11:18, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

EFF/literary agent lawsuit

These sources were previously listed at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions [35], they have been removed from there but could be useful in this article. Cirt (talk) 08:04, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot report : Found duplicate references !

In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :)

  • "milestone articles" :
    • While this article was announced as the milestone on the Main Page, multiple articles qualified due to the continuous creation and deletion of pages on the site.
    • {{Fact|date=February 2007}}

DumZiBoT (talk) 17:44, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Seigenthaler effect graph

Please see my concerns about the "Seigenthaler effect" graph that I just removed from Seigenthaler incident, but which still appears on this page. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 14:20, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

2,500,000th Article

So, what was the 2,500,000th article as listed on the main page? Is that something we can add to this page? Theloniouszen (talk) 21:43, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia Unfair: discriminates against small businesses

I wrote an informational article about a small business, not advertising. Just because the company is not a huge and doesn't have 1000s of articles written about it on the internet does not mean that people don't want information about it! I think this is extremely unfair and Wikipedia should review their policy. Your policy is effectively keeping small and mid-sized businesses from having articles on your site and promote the mamoth companies that already have millions of informational articles available on the internet.

I WANT A REAL ANSWER FROM A LIVE PERSON, NOT A FORM LETTER PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!

TSD2000 (talk) 15:55, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Here's an answer from a live person. Wikipedia is not a business directory or a SPAM site. If your business is notable (meaning that it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources) then it gets an article. Otherwise no. You are welcome to try and change our policy via the appropriate means. Manning (talk) 20:47, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Controversies - Stephen Colbert

No mention of this in the controversies section. Seems like a no-brainer to me. National news and a pretty interesting story.

205.219.133.241 (talk) 13:47, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Iran

Wayiran (talk · contribs) has twice removed (and I have restored) the section on Iran. The first removal had an edit summary of "unsourced", the second, none. There was no attempt to add a {{fact}} template, and no other unsourced item on the page was removed or otherwise challenged, Given that the user concerned says on their user page that they are "proud to be Iranian" and "proud of the Islamic Republic of Iran", there would appear to be a clear conflict of interest. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:03, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Please just add a reliable source if you have. As a wikipedian I am responsible to remove unsourced wrong materials from the articles. --Wayiran (talk) 12:47, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

First article

What was the first Wikipedia article? Daniel Christensen (talk) 17:48, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Key people in setting up the Arbcom structure

Is there a specific rationale for singling out Florence Devouard and Fred Bauder as being key to the arbcom structure? As I recall Florence was never a member of the arbcom at all. Is the implication that she exerted influence behind the scenes? I don't doubt Fred Bauders great influence on the *practices* of the arbcom, but I do have some misgivings about saying the same about its _structure_ without some better references; even if it is stated with the implicit caveat that other people were involved. I would be glad to find out that Fred in fact basically created it from the ground up in terms of structure, and that would of course satisfy my curiosity fully on that point.

Do allow me to emphasize that this is in no shape or form a slam on either Fred or Florence, they justly have made a *huge* contribution to wikimedia, but I am not sure to my own satisfaction that the structure of the arbcom was they most pertinently did it. If somebody knows, please fill in the details! -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. (talk) 03:23, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

First major news story

Wales cites a story in The New York Times as the "first real notice" Wikipedia got here. Skomorokh 17:03, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Rewriting history

This edit rewrote history, especially the part about "The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry Sanger"... that was changed. QuackGuru (talk) 04:51, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


In the above statement the older part is referred to as "history" ("the real story") the newer part is pointed out as "re-" rewriting, reshaping. In doing so, the older part gets more weight, a more important role, than the later created part. This way of thinking, can block (history-) writing from a broader perspective. WikiPedia is an ongoing editing process, older parts can be seen as having the same weight as later added parts. Letting in different perspectives and opinions create cool history-writing.

This edit was created to broaden the perspective on the founding fathers/mothers-theme, that at the moment is pretty narrow. Pioneering thinking of a "Wiki-way" of working has roots in a world-wide movement, pioneering thinking about free-of-copyright-content as well. It was not just three or four men who did it.

Close readers will notice, no details have been removed: the dinner of WikiWiki-man Ben Kovitz and Bomis Inc./Nupedia-man Sanger is still there. It is not discussed by Sanger, that he got the idea of using a wiki for Nupedia from Kovitz, so this was written more clearly.

The sources used were the already added ones, further I used back-ground information about the open-source-movement, the free-of-copyright-movement, the pioneers and early adapters of unmoderated mailing-list-discussions, bulletin-boards etc.

86.82.29.47 (talk) 15:35, 7 April 2009 (UTC) AZ, The Netherlands

The origins of Wikipedia date to 2000, when Sanger was finishing his doctoral thesis in philosophy and had an idea for a Web site. He wrote to an acquaintance, Jimmy Wales, who had helped found a pop-culture site, for feedback about his idea. Wales was in the process of launching Nupedia in San Diego, which was to be a free, online encyclopedia written by the Internet community and edited by experts.
In 2001, over dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Pacific Beach, a friend introduced Sanger to wiki technology. Sanger says he saw wiki, which takes its name from the Hawaiian word for quick, as a way to get Nupedia off the ground.
Wales agreed, and Wikipedia was launched as a spinoff. Sanger was the project's sole paid editorial employee until funding ran out during the dot-com crunch in 2002.[36]
Sanger initially proposed the concept of a Nupedia Wiki to Wales.[37]
This edit rewrote the history of Wikipedia. The text claims The process and technology of a "Wiki" website was introduced to Bomis by Ben Kovitz. Sanger introduced the concept to Wales, not Ben Kovitz. QuackGuru (talk) 17:37, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Bomis Inc. is not alone Wales, Bomis Inc. is a company, a juridical entity, and Sanger was an employee of this company, hired with the task to coordinate, organise, build, create, ... an online encyclopedia with free delivered content from not to pay people. This was a new concept, not yet been produced on the web so Sanger was, let's say, "Head of the department developing i-encyclopedia" at Bomis Inc. A separated isle within Bomis Inc., that was known for a different type of sites.

It was a business-model, Bomis Inc. run internet-sites with the goal to sell advertisements, so Bomis' sites had to attract many visitors. There was little budget to build and run the encyclopedia-sites. After about a year, Bomis Inc. gave Sanger the specific instruction to find a way to get content for the encyclopedia website quicker (wikiwiki ;)) than the preceding year. Sanger spoke with Kovitz about this problem, which was a Bomis Inc.-problem, not a private problem of Sanger, and Kovitz explained / or proposed to use the Wiki-concept & technology. So Kovitz introduced or proposed the wiki-concept and technology to Bomis Inc, via Sanger. 86.82.29.47 (talk) 07:44, 8 April 2009 (UTC)AZ

Kovitz mentioned the wiki-concept to Sanger. Sanger made a specific proposal to Wales. Kovitz never made any proposal directly to Bomis. QuackGuru (talk) 18:07, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

how do you know this so detailed ? are you Sanger ? 213.46.208.49 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:04, 9 April 2009 (UTC).

Ben Kovitz--who is a friend of mine--didn't propose anything to anybody. As I remember it, he described wikis to me over dinner, and I immediately started thinking about wiki as a possible tool to solve the problems we were having with Nupedia. I am sure I discussed the idea with Ben over dinner. I soon went and made an argument for Jimmy to set up a wiki for me to start setting up. He did (or someone at Bomis did), and I did. --Larry Sanger (talk) 21:12, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

  • I believe history is the event has already been passing away. Based on the previous experience, someone can improve what he or she is going to do. Hectorso (talk) 06:45, 20 April 2009 (UTC)hector so

Switch to Creative Commons License

Can someone update the page with details of the switch (?) to Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0? I don't know enough to do it justice. twilsonb (talk) 01:05, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

My views on WP

My views on WP and CZ are repeatedly misrepresented in this article. "In 2006, Larry Sanger founded Citizendium, based upon a modified version of MediaWiki. It has expert-led top-down culture, the absence of which in Wikipedia he views as a major concern." CZ does not have a top-down culture, and I do not have a "major concern," whatever that would be, that a "top-down culture" is absent in WP. CZ has a better claim to being a bottom-up project than WP, as I have argued in the CZ blog. I also would not say that CZ is "expert-led." It is at best expert-guided. It is a bottom-up wiki, an open project, in which anybody can start and work on any article he wants. Anyone who maintains otherwise either has an axe to grind, or hasn't spent any time on the site--or both. Anyway, I find the views attributed to me here in a few different places to be little more than straw men. --Larry Sanger (talk) 02:54, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Daily Telegraph article on Wikipedia

Apparently this erroneous statement was based on information obtained from this Wikipedia page Little Professor (talk) 00:27, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Felipe Ortega's research

According to the website of theBBC, research by Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega suggests that Wikipedia lost 49, 000 of its active editors in the first few months of 2009. Do you think this should be mentioned here? ACEOREVIVED (talk) 00:18, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Missing something--how to fix?

Resolved

There appears to be text missing in this passage just after footnote #73:

The policy for "Checkuser" (a MediaWiki extension to assist detection of abuse via internet sock-puppetry) was established in November 2005.[73] but was viewed more as a system tool at the time, as a result of which there had been no need for a policy covering use on a more routine basis.[74]

Adding a comma doesn't work logically; it appears there is an entire clause, if not more, missing. The missing text was probably mistakenly deleted in an edit. Sorry, I am new to Wikipedia and I have yet to figure out how to check the edit history. I may have time to do it later, but in the meantime maybe someone can figure out what to do to correct this. Thank you! Juniperjoline1 (talk) 19:14, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Juniper, and well spotted. I'm not sure how the text was lost, but I found it in this version of the article from September 2007, and re-added it. You can see old versions of a page by clicking the corresponding date visible after clicking the "History" tab at the top of an article.
Cheers, Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 12:21, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Hmm again.

Nothing here or in Wikipedia about Certain Recent Events--events which are at least as important as almost anything else on this page, since the actual founding of the project or a major milestone like one million articles. --Larry Sanger (talk) 01:46, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Good lord. Still nothing here, after coverage by the BBC, the Guardian, FoxNews.com, etc. --Larry Sanger (talk) 04:53, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

At the risk of encouraging a WP:COI violation: {{sofixit}}. :) Robofish (talk) 23:17, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia Signpost wrote about "Certain Recent Events" on wikiMedia. Which is not wikiPedia. So Certain Recent Events belong to the History of Wikimedia. Or am I missing something? Ralph Saroyan (talk) 09:30, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Historical_overview_by_year hatnote

I don't really get the hatnote in the History_of_Wikipedia#Historical_overview_by_year section, I wonder if corss namespace links have been deleted since it was put there?

'Articles summarizing each year are held within the Wikipedia project namespace and are linked to below. Additional resources for research are available within the Wikipedia records and archives, and are listed at the end of this article.'

Lee∴V (talk • contribs) 10:08, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Co-founder

"Founding" and "co-founding" logically not being mutually exclusive, I tweaked 1st sentence in the pgraf contrasting Wales's self-definition as founder with the many references to his being co-founder.--Hodgson-Burnett's Secret Garden (talk) 20:46, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Uncertain if this is true

Under Background, "The idea of using automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to librarian Charles Ammi Cutter's article "The Buffalo Public Library in 1983""

Having read that (it is on Wikisource), I have to ask where that is discussed in Cutter's article. The closest I can see are the photographic catalog and the "reading rooms", neither of which come close to "build[ing] a more useful encyclopedia". 150.250.177.183 (talk) 01:13, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Seems to be original research, and not even very compelling at that. I have removed it for the time being.
In contrast, for all the others mentioned in that section (Otlet, Wells, Bush, Nelson), there are reliable sources regarding them as part of Wikipedia's heritage; I have added such a reference.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:40, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Effect of biographical articles

When their lawyer tried to purge the Wikipedia article.

What. --illythr (talk) 23:02, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
That whole section needs some love. For now I've clarified that bullet point using the sources cited in the linked article. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 04:12, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Mon, 15 Jan 2001

First edit to Wikipedia:

  • WikiPedia is a wide-open encyclopedia project. Who knows where it will go?[38]

I venture no one could have guessed.   Will Beback  talk  01:37, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

ArbCom mentions for 2003 and 2004

These touch on Florence, who was very important to the wiki communities early on (pre-2004) and then joined the Board in 2004 along with Angela (who isn't mentioned in the election bit at all!), but who wasn't anything to do with ArbCom. From the initial version of the Committee's page you can see the original appointees, who don't include Florence (Anthere). The main policy drafters were User:MartinHarper (then "MyRedDice"), myself and Fred Bauder. Note that despite that list, Erik didn't accept his nomination, so we were 11 at the start, and UninvitedCompany resigned in February before we took our first open case.

Obviously I could edit this, but given that we also wrote the COI policy I'd feel a little morally wrong doing so. :-)

James F. (talk) 20:38, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Douglas Adams and Hitchikers Guide

It strikes me that this article would not be complete without the crediting of the visionary genius, not too mention hilarious, author Douglas Adams, RIP. His trilogy on the Hitchhikers guide has no doubt inspired Wikipedia, and he was clearly ahead of his time in terms of how the world almost works today, in terms of laptops, Iphones etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_adams

82.32.17.95 (talk) 21:16, 17 November 2011 (UTC)Mythole

Wikipedia:WikiProject Tabular Data

Wikidata, mentioned in the subsection "2012", seems to be relevant to Wikipedia:WikiProject Tabular Data.
—Wavelength (talk) 19:35, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

written by over 31 million registered users

The documents seem to say 16.7 million users... --Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:15, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

omission

Could mention Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia... AnonMoos (talk) 18:19, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

May 2005 - Hitwise report

In the paragraph "Historical overview by year" I read: 

- In May 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet according to traffic monitoring company Hitwise, relegating Dictionary.com to second place. -

Does a source of this information exist somewhere? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nechljudov1981 (talk • contribs) 07:44, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Revisiting Wikipedia Zero as redirect

Hi, some moths ago it was decided that Wikipedia Zero would simply redirect here: History_of_Wikipedia#2011. Really though? It is a remarkable initiative, growing in countries as more mobile operators join. See wmf:Mobile_partnerships#Where_is_Wikipedia_free_to_access.3F and mw:Press Coverage of Wikipedia Zero to get an idea of the impact. mw:Wikipedia Zero has all the details. Please reconsider as this is now a lot more than event related to the history of Wikipedia in 2011.--QuimGil (talk) 17:46, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


Over 26 million wikipedia articles

Hi, why it is written that there are only over 26 million articles? In the Grand-Total statics i read even over 36 milleion! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.66.60.52 (talk) 22:24, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Etymology

One learns at WikiWikiWeb that wiki is Hawaiian for "fast" or "quick." So happens there is a chain of stores in Lithuania called Iki, which means the same thing in Lithuanian. Lithuanian (and Latvian) are ancient Baltic languages unrelated to neighboring language groups, but supposedly related to Sanskrit.

Now I'm wondering if a) there's any relationship between wiki and iki, or b) if either word is related to one in Sanskrit. Anybody know? Sca (talk) 13:59, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Controversies?

Is there a reason why the Controversy section begins at January 2005? Surely there must have been controversies during the first four years of Wikipedia. I'm not expecting this list to be comprehensive (there is a separate article for that) but it's puzzling to see a glossing over of the early years in this timeline. NewJerseyLiz Let's Talk 19:02, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Speak not of the Dark Times again or thou shalt be henceforth booted from the internet! (just kidding -- sorry I could not resist) I too am curious about the detailed history of wikipedia. In some ways, though, I think that en.wikipedia.org is the wrong place for such details. No doubt there were controversies, of various petty internal sorts. But the usual rules of wikipedia are pretty clear -- the topic (or in this case sub-topic) has to be both encyclopedic and notable, and is preferably reported in a tertiary reliable source. Back in 2002, there were not all that many articles about wikipedia, compared to the post-2006 era. Wikipedia is one of the top ten websites in the world now, but it was certainly not before 2005. So in a way, the lack of detail in this article is consistent with the main goal: creating the best encyclopedia we possibly can. Although it is conceivable there are deep dark secrets being erased from history, I kinda doubt it. From scanning through the linked articles, I do not find any references to specific pre-2005 controversies, unless you count a couple of snide potshots by employees of Encyclopedia Britannica as controversial. I have an edit to make that is useful, so after I do that, I'll go ahead and put something into the article itself, to see if somebody can confirm whether omission of controversies during the first few years of wikipedia's existence is due to eviiiiil, or just due to the non-Notability of early controversies such-as-they-were. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 05:54, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

popularity-rankings

Text as of November 2013.

  • According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is the world's sixth-most-popular website.[8]
  • According to comScore,
  • Wikipedia receives over 85 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.[9]
  1. ^ Alternative language wikipedias
  2. ^ First article in the catalan wikipedia
  3. ^ find rederence
  4. ^ Wikipedia:AnnouncementsMay 2001
  5. ^ International_Wikipedia
  6. ^ Wikipedia AnnouncementsSeptember 2001
  7. ^ International wikipedias statistics
  8. ^ "Wikipedia.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  9. ^ "comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for August 2012". comScore. 12 September 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2013.

Good-faith change[39] by Seanpconnelly on 3rd Dec.

  • According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is now the fith-most-popular website as of December 2012 .
  • According to AllThingsD [1],
  • Wikipedia receives over 85 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.[2]
  1. ^ http://allthingsd.com/20121220/the-fifth-biggest-site-in-the-world-operated-on-a-budget-of-27m-last-year/
  2. ^ "comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for August 2012". comScore. 12 September 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2013.

Good-faith update[40] by 62.65.192.82 on 12th Dec.

  • According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia is now the sixth-most-popular website as of December 2013.
  • According to AllThingsD [1],
  • Wikipedia receives over 85 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.[2]
  1. ^ http://allthingsd.com/20121220/the-fifth-biggest-site-in-the-world-operated-on-a-budget-of-27m-last-year/
  2. ^ "comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for August 2012". comScore. 12 September 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2013.

My consolidated version, with all three factoids (plus one historical factoid for contrast), as of today.

  • According to Alexa Internet, Wikipedia was the world's sixth-most-popular website as of December 2013,[1] unchanged from 2012.[2]
  • (Dow Jones put Wikipedia in fifth at 2012 year-end.)[3]
  • According to comScore,
  • Wikipedia receives over 85 million monthly unique visitors from the United States alone.[4]
  1. ^ "Wikipedia.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 12 December 2013.
  2. ^ Wikipedia.org Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved 8 November 2012.
  3. ^ http://allthingsd.com/20121220/the-fifth-biggest-site-in-the-world-operated-on-a-budget-of-27m-last-year, by Liz Gannes; AllThingsD became a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company Inc in 2005, and was absorbed into WSJ.com during 2013.
  4. ^ "comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for August 2012". comScore. 12 September 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2013.

The historical Alexa-data was pulled from the archives, Line 177.[41] Anybody think this revamp is incorrect, or could be improved? Looking into the Dow Jones figure, there does not seem to be an update... sometime during 2013, the AllThingsD subsidiary website was pulling into the WSJ (as WSJ.D apparently) and although they mention wikipedia in about three dozen articles, WSJ.D hasn't mentioned a popularity-ranking for 2013 that I noticed. Thanks. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:13, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Update, turned out to be a bit more complicated of a changset;[42] I moved the 2012-figures into the historical subsection, and left simpler language in the lead-section up top. HTH. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:36, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

2014 book The Innovators mentions this Wikipedia article

This article History of Wikipedia specifically mentioned in 2014 book The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution:

Also a positive mention on page 440:

— Cirt (talk) 02:33, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Also an excerpt from the book published by The Daily Beast:

— Cirt (talk) 03:01, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

The New York Times: Wikipedia Emerges as Trusted Internet Source for Ebola Information

Might be a useful source for use in this article. — Cirt (talk) 03:08, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Disputed edit

This edit was made by User:Peter Damian, reverted by User:Francis Schonken with the edit summary, "the story line in these sections is "what happened", not "who did it", e.g. who registered the domain names not mentioned.", restored by User:Vejvančický with the edit summary, "restored a more detailed and informative revision, the restored content is verifiable by many sources i.e. at G-Books - please discuss at the talk page instead of reverting.", and reverted by User:Schonken with the edit summary, "again, story line is: what happened, not who did it, e.g. not mentioned who registered the domain names."

The disputed edit deletes

In January 2001, Wikipedia began as a side-project of Nupedia, to allow collaboration on articles prior to entering the peer-review process.<ref>{{cite news |author=[[Larry Sanger]] |title=Let's make a wiki |date=10 January 2001 |work=Nupedia-l mailing list| publisher=Internet Archive|url=http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-January/000676.html |archiveurl = https://web.archive.org/web/20030414014355/http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-January/000676.html |archivedate = 14 April 2003}}</ref>

replacing it with

In January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept of a wiki by extreme programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz after explaining to Kovitz the slow pace of growth Nupedia endured as a result of its onerous submission process.<ref name="am 2006 p91"/> Kovitz suggested that adopting the wiki model would allow editors to contribute simultaneously and incrementally throughout the project, thus breaking Nupedia's bottleneck.<ref name="am 2006 p91"/> Sanger was excited about the idea, and after he proposed it to Wales, they created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001.<ref name="am 2006 p91"/><ref>{{cite news |author=[[Larry Sanger]] |title=Let's make a wiki |date=10 January 2001 |work=Nupedia-l mailing list| publisher=Internet Archive|url=http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-January/000676.html |archiveurl = https://web.archive.org/web/20030414014355/http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-January/000676.html |archivedate = 14 April 2003}}</ref>

and adds

The wiki was initially intended as a collaborative project for the public to write articles that would then be reviewed for publication by Nupedia's expert volunteers. The majority of Nupedia's experts, however, wanted nothing to do with this project, fearing that mixing amateur content with professionally researched and edited material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia's information and damage the credibility of the encyclopedia.<ref name=signon/>

The first part of this edit does personalise the history a bit more than the earlier version. I'm still deciding whether this is a good thing. Meanwhile, Peter, can you clarify what sources are represented by "am2006" and "signon", please? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 23:54, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Not enough time this week. I wonder if it's that important? Peter Damian (talk) 20:33, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
am 2006 is The Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, p. 91; signon is Jonathan Sidener, "Everyone's encyclopedia", http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041206/news_mz1b6encyclo.html Peter Damian (talk) 20:34, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

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False graph at the very top

Someone please update the image. - üser:Altenmann >t 00:22, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Contradiction

The lead of this article dates Richard Stallman's essay "The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" to December 2000, whereas the section immediately below, "Background", dates it to 1999. I see that the message-board post used as the ref in both places bears the date 18 December 2000 but says at the bottom "Copyright 1999 Richard Stallman". I don't know enough to resolve this contradiction, but the article shouldn't be giving two different dates for the same document. Deor (talk) 23:02, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

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h2g2

Why is h2g2 ignored when it was launched in 1999 and was the first user generated encyclopedia by some time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.236.246.146 (talk) 00:35, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

"Wikipedia was imagined in a Mexican restaurant in San Diego."

Page 143 of The Wikipedia Revolution says, "Wikipedia was imagined in a Mexican restaurant in San Diego.". Supposedly Sanger and Wales were having lunch/dinner? Should we add this info, or is it too trivial?Zigzig20s (talk) 00:53, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

Oi think we should add it because it is part of its history since that was the place it was thought up so in my opinion it should be added somewhere Likeaboss54545 (talk) 08:18, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

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Wales and Sanger dispute

From what is stated, Sanger sounds more like inventor and pioneer of the Wikipedia while Wales was co-founder, financier and then some type of executive or producer kind of position. Having two "founders" is bit ambiguous unless the whole idea was brainstormed up from zero in same room. Point being, Wales can't claim sole credit even retroactively because without Sanger he wouldn't have anything to claim to. Puzzling why he does so as externally it tarnishes his image. Sounds like Wales was insecure about his contributions and there was reason for that but he wants to deny it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.155.16.32 (talk) 10:58, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

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Jimmy Wales

How did Jimmy Wales lose control over Wikipedia?--Saramag (talk) 14:05, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Role of Jimmy Wales.--Moxy (talk) 14:28, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Possibly unnecessary quote marks

"Projects and milestones" section:

On 20 June 2003, the same day that the Wikimedia Foundation was founded, "Wikiquote" was created.
A month later, "Wikibooks" was launched. "Wikisource" was set up towards the end of the year. 83.28.28.15 (talk) 18:32, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Significant milestones

It would be good if this article could clarify when significant milestones in Wikipedia's history, such as Wikipedia: Village pump or Wikipedia: Articles for deletion were set up in Wikipedia. Vorbee (talk) 20:38, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Not a lot of recent information

Their isn't a lot of information about the recent histiory of the site outside of the lead about news in 2018 and very little about news for 2017. Zubin12 (talk) 06:20, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 04:36, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

First 10K contributions to Wikipedia

I thought this resource might be of use/interest for this page: https://reagle.org/joseph/2010/wp/redux/ -Reagle (talk) 14:36, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Hey @Reagle:, i do believe it's a historically very meaningful piece of archive. By the way, what would you (and anybody involved in this article) think about adding a paragraph about academic milestones like your book, Lih's, Tkacz's and a few others as a testimony of growing interest on Wikipedia as an academic topic over time ? Alexandre Hocquet (talk) 02:43, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
@Alexandre Hocquet: I think that's a fine idea, but I wouldn't do it myself because of WP:COI. -14:11, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
Yes @Reagle:, that's the tricky part, I agree. I kind of am myself involved. Maybe less so, so I could give it a shot and add a disclaimer in this talk page.Alexandre Hocquet (talk) 23:49, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Exact date when English Wikipedia hit 100,000 articles

"The English Wikipedia passed 100,000 articles in 2003" does anyone know the exact date when this happened? If anyone was on Wikipedia on January 2003 please do tell if you have an exact date when the website displayed that Wikipedia worked on 100,000 articles. BMO4744 (talk) 20:09, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia's 20th birthday suggestion

Can this article be developed to be the featured article on 15 January 2021?

And when should there be a '20 year WP member Society' (given that there are 10- and 15- year societies)? Jackiespeel (talk) 16:56, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Hello World

I have heard on the BBC quiz programme Only Connect that Jimmy Wales' first words on Wikipedia were "Hello World". If any could find a reliable source for Wales' first words on Wikipedia, it could go in the article. Vorbee (talk) 17:17, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

This is already mentioned in the second paragraph of the "Founding of Wikipedia" subsection. It is, however, sourced only to Wales's claim of making the edit, since the edit itself does not survive. Deor (talk) 18:23, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

A third of what's on Wikipedia

Around one third of the articles of the English version comes from a single user. The history of WP seems to be the right place to mention him.Philosopher81sp (talk) 18:11, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 22 March 2021

The way Larry’s quote is edited in § Early roles of Wales and Sanger makes little sense. Please replace it with the following:

In Sanger's introductory message to the Nupedia mailing list, he said that Jimmy Wales "contacted me and asked me to apply as editor-in-chief of Nupedia. […] He had had the idea for Nupedia since at least last fall. He tells me that, when thinking about people (particularly philosophers) he knew who could manage this sort of long-term project, he thought I would be perfect for the job."

As it currently stands, there’s a non-sequitur mention of Bomis erroneously (and non-grammatically) linked to a sentence fragment, and a missing appositional comma after the quoted mention of Wales. The above version also includes a statement ("he’s had the idea since at least last fall”) that is currently separated from the passage it appeared in. 151.132.206.250 (talk) 17:43, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

 Done. Volteer1 (talk) 07:01, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
Per MOS:LQ, please put the final period inside the quotation marks (… dream job."). Thanks! —151.132.206.250 (talk) 18:35, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
 Not done: The source material has "This is indeed my dream job, because...". As MOS:LQ says to only place terminal punctuation inside quotes if it was in the original source, it is correct to place the period outside of the quotes. Pupsterlove02 talk • contribs 18:42, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
Oh, whoops, my mistake! Thanks for the attention to detail. —151.132.206.250 (talk) 19:50, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

aku melihat sesuatu pada pagi hari ini

subjek-predikat-penutup 140.213.127.230 (talk) 07:53, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

2004 Bourgeois v. Peters citation

Hi, is there a way to improve the quotation style, or add more context to Bourgeois v. Peters in History_of_Wikipedia#2004? As written its not clear which part of the larger quote is actually being cited or why; the original document at least uses double quotation marks and a clear Wikipedia citation immediately after the quote. I'm at a loss for a decent suggestion, or I would offer an edit.

While on the subject, Wikipedia:Wikipedia_as_a_court_source has a redirect for Bourgeois_v._Peters but it only comes to the history section here, and that seems pretty useless as such - if its only for the references, then perhaps add refs there, and red-link it?

Thanks! Strangerpete (talk) 23:11, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Maybe when you meet him to? 140.213.127.230 (talk) 07:55, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Criticism of Wikipedia's fundraising banners

I think there's enough criticism of the way Wikipedia goes about fundraising that it's notable to put in the article at this point; however, I am not 100% set on that, and when I tried to write up a sentence it just came out very...off? Either way, I couldn't write anything that was written well, and combined with me not being 100% set, I'm asking here for more opinions/someone else to write it. Sorry. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 11:50, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Who set up Nupedia's wiki?

I have just now added a ref with announcement of Nupedia's wiki, but Larry's mail doesn't make it clear who set it up (and current version says it was Jimmy with no refs). Anyone researched this subject in depth? Please pull in some more good sources on the history of WP, it would be great to have all most important first-hand accounts in this article! 188.66.35.138 (talk) 17:15, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Nonprofit?

When did Wikipedia become nonprofit?

Talk:History of Wikipedia/Archive 1 includes a comment from Jimbo Wales 2007-04-20 that Larry Sanger claimed he was the "founder of Wikipedia", and Jimbo described himself as the "founder of Wikimedia Foundation", in part to avoid arguing over whether he or Sanger or both deserved to be called the "founder of Wikipedia".

Since the initial version had domain names ending in ".com", it suggests that Nupedia and Wikipedia were still initially founded as for-profit organizations. However, when it became clear that funding had to come from contributions, the organization was presumably converted to a nonprofit. How did that happen? I'd like to see a section on that in the present article, if that's feasible.

FYI: I'll be hosting a half-hour call-in on Wikipedia, live on 90.1 FM, KKFI.org, Kansas City, this evening starting 2022-12-20T18:00 (-6) = 2022-12-24T00:00 UTC. You can join at that time via Zoom with links in Wikimedia call-in on KKFI. If you read this while there is still time, you can connect via Zoom from anyplace in the world with an adequate Internet conneciton.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:57, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

My question regarding when the project became a nonprofit is answered in "Wikimedia Foundation#History": Volunteers creating content were opposed to running ads, which meant they would have to ask for donations. To support that, the Wikimedia Foundation was officially founded 2003-06-20. DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:06, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

The redesign is horrendous

Collapsed off-topic discussion

It is 100% more difficult to navigate the website. The previous design was perfect as it followed the KISS principle. Now nagivating between pages and articles is a lot more difficult and requires much more user interaction, which is not the point of what Wikipedia wants to be; an encyclopedia anyone can access.

The new CSS looks like it was designed by a elementary school child. Please tell me there is a way to revert to normal logged in or out, because I am never going to use this site again in this format. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.94.39.140 (talk) 21:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

If you sign up for an account, you can select the old Vector 2010 skin in your preferences. Cullen328 (talk) 21:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Pinging @AHollender (WMF) so they are aware. S0091 (talk) 21:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
I expect that supported add-ons will soon appear to allow users of the major browsers to reverse this change locally. As an interim fix, readers who are not logged in and are comfortable with JavaScript can return to the previous skin by installing Tampermonkey and adding this script with @match modified to https://en.wikipedia.org/* Certes (talk) 22:16, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
I was able to reinstate the old interface. Easily done. Familiar. I am a Luddite. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 22:43, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

What is meant by *the sighter* in the May 2009 entry in section "Effect of biographical articles"?

What does the following mean?

[...] the sighter marked this as "sighted" (meaning that there is no vandalism in the article).

I've googled the word "sighter" and not found any meaning that seems relevant.

Thanks Misha Wolf (talk) 20:26, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Misha Wolf, my guess is that is a poor translation from the German of their equivalent term for a New pages patroller. We have "oversighters" but that is different. Cullen328 (talk) 20:34, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
@Cullen328, I, too, thought it might be a poor translation. Can you think of any way of improving the text? As it stands, it doesn't make sense. How about something like a reviewer instead of the sighter and checked instead of "sighted"? Misha Wolf (talk) 20:42, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Misha Wolf, I would not object to that change, but it would be nice if a German speaker could let us know what the equivalent of NPP volunteers are called there. Cullen328 (talk) 20:47, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
With some difficulty (I don't speak German, so found the UI difficult to navigate), I've asked for help on the German Wikipedia, at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Auskunft#Problematic_translation_from_German_Wikipedia_to_English_Wikipedia. Misha Wolf (talk) 22:57, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
I've had a very helpful reply, saying that the appropriate English words are reviewer and reviewed. So I'll make those two changes. Misha Wolf (talk) 23:02, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Well done, Misha Wolf. Cullen328 (talk) 00:34, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
It's a pending changes reviewer. Remember, German WP has pending changes enabled globally. Andreas JN466 00:39, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, @Jayen466! Misha Wolf (talk) 00:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
There've been further comments from German Wikipedia editors about the wording. The consensus is that the words reviewer and reviewed do not correctly describe this situation. As I don't want to introduce technical terms which would only be understood by Wikipedia insiders, I've changed the sentence to:
The change was checked, by another editor, for obvious vandalism, but as the vandalism was subtle, it wasn't spotted.
Any comments on that?
Oh, as I was writing that, another comment was made on the German Wikipedia, saying:
That sentence is okay, but of course "checked" is rather general and doesn't explicitly refer to flagged revisions. You could maybe say "That change was flagged/marked by another editor as vandalism-free, but as..."
Hmm. In the context of the section we're discussing, I suspect that such a level of detail is not useful. What do others think?
Thanks Misha Wolf (talk) 16:15, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Change the position of milestones

I wonder... May you try changing the position of each of Wikipedia article that has reached a milestone to make it relevant to the style of wiki? Technobladex (talk) 10:25, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

I blanked the milestones section

Some milestones have probably been covered in RS, but this entire section was mostly cruft. Mentions of milestones for other social media platforms (close enough to Wikipedia) are in body text and much rarer. Mach61 (talk) 21:05, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree. Notable cruft can be probably incorporated into the narrative history. --ZimZalaBim talk 21:42, 2 September 2023 (UTC)
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