Misplaced Pages

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Revision as of 08:58, 21 September 2002 editJeLuF (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users4,532 edits #REDIRECT U← Previous edit Latest revision as of 10:43, 30 December 2024 edit undoGraham87 (talk | contribs)Account creators, Autopatrolled, Event coordinators, Extended confirmed users, Page movers, Importers, Rollbackers292,132 edits →Creation of the page: note about modern iteration of UseModWiki page link fixup script 
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{{short description|Historical Misplaced Pages documentation page}}
#REDIRECT ]
{{pp-move-indef}}
].]]

This page, originally in the ] as '''UuU''', contains what was the earliest surviving edit on the ] (and hence any Misplaced Pages and project in the ]) prior to the importation of earlier edits in 2019. ] was made on January 16, 2001, at 20:08:33 ]. Earlier edits had been made to the English Misplaced Pages and were discovered in archives in 2010, but did not survive in page histories due to the unreliable nature of page histories kept by contemporaneous software.

Intended as a list of countries beginning with the letter "U", and particularly to add the ] to the list of countries, its odd title is a result of software considerations of the time. The page's creation survived due to the low activity on the page between its creation and the conversion of Misplaced Pages to software that kept page histories reliably. It was discovered as having Misplaced Pages's earliest surviving edit in 2004, and was moved to the "Misplaced Pages" namespace, gaining its prefix, in 2006. As the author has waived copyright for all his contributions to Misplaced Pages, the original revision is in the ].

As of July 30, 2019, the ] to the English Misplaced Pages is the first edit present in the Starling logs, the creation of ]. ], which was wiped from the servers and did not survive in the Starling logs, has been disclosed by Misplaced Pages co-founder ] and was minted as a ] (NFT) in 2021.

==Background==
Misplaced Pages was launched on January 15, 2001, as an offshoot of the encyclopedia ]. It initially used the wiki engine ], which did not keep page histories reliably. At the time, preservation of page histories was seen as unimportant on wikis since such pages were considered to exist in the ] and at times even contrary to the spirit of a wiki per ].<ref>]</ref> UseModWiki used CamelCase to automatically create links to articles, a feature that had been inherited from Ward Cunningham's ] and thereby ultimately from the programming language ].<ref>]</ref>

==Creation of the page==
]
UuU was created on January 16, 2001, by ] under the name{{efn|name="Domains"|Domain names ] by UseModWiki, indicating an anonymous user from a server with the given ], so neither "office.bomis.com" nor "eiffel.demon.co.uk" were proper usernames. ] would be the first true named user later on January 16.}} eiffel.demon.co.uk in the surviving edit. It was the 11th page created on the English Misplaced Pages,{{efn|The first 10 were, in order, ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], ], and ].<ref name=rc>Starling rclog</ref>}} and the first not created by ].{{efn|name="Domains"}}<ref name=rc/> Browne had made the first non-] edit to Misplaced Pages eight minutes earlier<ref name=rc/> by adding bullet points and ] to the list on the article ].<ref name="Sports">{{cite news |author=eiffel.demon.co.uk |title=SportS |work=Starling diff_log |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=January 16, 2001}}</ref> Browne, a user of WikiWikiWeb, had earlier attempted to contribute to Nupedia but was turned down due to a lack of formal qualification that Nupedia expected of its contributors.<ref name="Background">{{cite web |author=Eiffel |title=User talk:Eiffel |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=User_talk:Eiffel&diff=prev&oldid=740956284 |website=Misplaced Pages |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=September 24, 2016 |accessdate=July 21, 2019}}</ref>

The article was intended to help fill out an alphabetical list of countries. Recalling the article's creation Browne explained further:

{{quotation|Someone had already set up some categories (taken from Nupedia I think), one of which was 'Countries' and included unlinked entries for the letters A-Z. Someone had created a stub for ], so I added it to the index.|Roger Browne|3=UuU Talk page<span class="plainlinks"></span>}}

The title was a ] hack to create a link to an article that would otherwise be named ']'.<ref name="Lih">Lih p. 64</ref> Such an article name was impossible due to article links being represented by CamelCased text rather than double-bracketed phrases (so-called "free links"), making the shortest possible article name three letters long: a capital letter, followed by at least one lowercase letter, followed by at least one capital letter.<ref name="Lih">Lih p. 64</ref>

The ] of the page's first version as given by the ] is:

<pre>
* UnitedKingdom
* ]
* Uruguay
</pre>

The second line was originally "* UnitedStates" without brackets,<ref name="edit">{{cite news |author=eiffel.demon.co.uk |title=UuU |work=Starling diff_log |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=January 16, 2001}}</ref> but was converted by a UseModWiki script (now known retroactively in the XML conversion of the Misplaced Pages database as ]) into a free link later in 2001.

==Subsequent history==
Listing countries using this method was soon deprecated; the page ] was created on January 21,<ref name=rc/> and on February 6 ] noted that use of the similar page ] was "now discouraged".<ref name="AaA">{{cite web |author=JimboWales |title=AaA |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=AaA&oldid=233181 |website=Misplaced Pages |date=February 6, 2001 |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |accessdate=July 21, 2019}}</ref> By April 2001 the alphabetical lists of countries had been merged into one article that is now known as ].

Misplaced Pages started supporting and encouraging free links in late February 2001. At that time a script was designed that converted all pre-existing CamelCase links to the new format, including the "UnitedStates" link on this page. The "UnitedKingdom" was unaffected since it was not at the time an article.{{efn|The camelcased "UnitedKingdom" would not be created until 2005, long after camelcased links became obsolete.<ref name="UK 2005">{{cite web |last1=Farmbrough |first1=Rich |title=UnitedKingdom |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=UnitedKingdom&oldid=17207996 |website=Wikpedia |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=February 16, 2005|access-date=8 November 2022}}</ref>}} This conversion was not recorded as an edit on the pages on which it was performed. Support of CamelCase links was dropped with the introduction of ] in January 2002, although almost all such links had already been removed by then.

The first UuU edit survived because {{diff|WP:UuU|385544927|291430|the page only received one edit}} between the time that it was created and Misplaced Pages's conversion to the Phase II software. That edit was in May 2001 and turned the page into a redirect to ], where it remained until it was discovered as containing Misplaced Pages's earliest surviving edit in 2004. It was {{diff|WP:UuU|48604813|label=moved to the Misplaced Pages namespace}} in 2006. Browne has not edited the page since its creation; he has deeded all his contributions to Misplaced Pages, including the initial revisions of this page, into the public domain.

In December 2010, earlier archives were ] by ], though many of these edits are not present in Misplaced Pages page histories. The earliest edit found in these archives was made to {{no redirect|HomePage}}, which read "This is the new WikiPedia!",<ref name="HomePage">{{cite news |author=office.bomis.com |title=HomePage |work=Starling diff_log |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |date=January 15, 2001}}</ref> while the first article{{efn|The Main Page is not considered an article.}} created was ].<ref name=rc/>

In December 2008, Jimmy Wales claimed to have made Misplaced Pages's first edit, a test edit with the text "]", but no such edit appears in Starling's archives, and Starling himself has speculated that the edit might have been made on a test wiki from January 10 that was later deleted.<ref name="Testwiki">{{cite web |last1=Starling |first1=Tim |authorlink=Tim Starling |title="Hello world?" |url=https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-January/108198.html |date=January 14, 2011 |website=WikiEN-l |publisher=Wikimedia Foundation |accessdate=July 19, 2019}}</ref> After hearing of the 2019 importations, Wales ], claiming to have deleted a lot of stuff "on the hard drive" to explain the absence of the edit. The edit ] and sold as a ] (NFT).

== See also ==
* ]
* ]
*], a list of all the pages in the August 2001 database dump, ordered by creation date
* ]
* ]
:*
*Browne would use the eiffel.demon.co.uk domain until January 18, 2001, making a total of 22 edits. These edits are inaccessible through ] due to ], which prevents edits from usernames that start with a lower-case letter from appearing in Special:Contributions. (Lists of early edits affected by this bug are at ]).

== Notes ==
{{notelist}}

== References==
{{reflist}}

== Bibliography ==
*{{cite book
|title=The Misplaced Pages REVOLUTION: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
|last=Lih
|first=Andrew
|year=2009
|publisher=Hyperion
|location=New York, New York
|isbn=978-1-4013-0371-6
}}


]

Latest revision as of 10:43, 30 December 2024

Historical Misplaced Pages documentation page
The January 16, 2001 UuU article version seen with the Nostalgia skin.

This page, originally in the main namespace as UuU, contains what was the earliest surviving edit on the English Misplaced Pages (and hence any Misplaced Pages and project in the Wikimedia Foundation) prior to the importation of earlier edits in 2019. The edit was made on January 16, 2001, at 20:08:33 UTC. Earlier edits had been made to the English Misplaced Pages and were discovered in archives in 2010, but did not survive in page histories due to the unreliable nature of page histories kept by contemporaneous software.

Intended as a list of countries beginning with the letter "U", and particularly to add the United States to the list of countries, its odd title is a result of software considerations of the time. The page's creation survived due to the low activity on the page between its creation and the conversion of Misplaced Pages to software that kept page histories reliably. It was discovered as having Misplaced Pages's earliest surviving edit in 2004, and was moved to the "Misplaced Pages" namespace, gaining its prefix, in 2006. As the author has waived copyright for all his contributions to Misplaced Pages, the original revision is in the public domain.

As of July 30, 2019, the current earliest surviving edit to the English Misplaced Pages is the first edit present in the Starling logs, the creation of HomePage. An even earlier edit to Misplaced Pages, which was wiped from the servers and did not survive in the Starling logs, has been disclosed by Misplaced Pages co-founder Jimmy Wales and was minted as a non-fungible token (NFT) in 2021.

Background

Misplaced Pages was launched on January 15, 2001, as an offshoot of the encyclopedia Nupedia. It initially used the wiki engine UseModWiki, which did not keep page histories reliably. At the time, preservation of page histories was seen as unimportant on wikis since such pages were considered to exist in the WikiNow and at times even contrary to the spirit of a wiki per ForgiveAndForget. UseModWiki used CamelCase to automatically create links to articles, a feature that had been inherited from Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb and thereby ultimately from the programming language Smalltalk.

Creation of the page

The edit as it appears in the Starling archives. Notice the original camelcased form of "UnitedStates".

UuU was created on January 16, 2001, by Roger Browne under the name eiffel.demon.co.uk in the surviving edit. It was the 11th page created on the English Misplaced Pages, and the first not created by office.bomis.com. Browne had made the first non-Bomis edit to Misplaced Pages eight minutes earlier by adding bullet points and orienteering to the list on the article SportS. Browne, a user of WikiWikiWeb, had earlier attempted to contribute to Nupedia but was turned down due to a lack of formal qualification that Nupedia expected of its contributors.

The article was intended to help fill out an alphabetical list of countries. Recalling the article's creation Browne explained further:

Someone had already set up some categories (taken from Nupedia I think), one of which was 'Countries' and included unlinked entries for the letters A-Z. Someone had created a stub for United_States, so I added it to the index.

— Roger Browne, UuU Talk page

The title was a CamelCase hack to create a link to an article that would otherwise be named 'U'. Such an article name was impossible due to article links being represented by CamelCased text rather than double-bracketed phrases (so-called "free links"), making the shortest possible article name three letters long: a capital letter, followed by at least one lowercase letter, followed by at least one capital letter.

The wikitext of the page's first version as given by the Nostalgia Misplaced Pages is: 

* UnitedKingdom
* ]
* Uruguay

The second line was originally "* UnitedStates" without brackets, but was converted by a UseModWiki script (now known retroactively in the XML conversion of the Misplaced Pages database as Page move link fixup script) into a free link later in 2001.

Subsequent history

Listing countries using this method was soon deprecated; the page CountriesU was created on January 21, and on February 6 Jimmy Wales noted that use of the similar page AaA was "now discouraged". By April 2001 the alphabetical lists of countries had been merged into one article that is now known as List of sovereign states.

Misplaced Pages started supporting and encouraging free links in late February 2001. At that time a script was designed that converted all pre-existing CamelCase links to the new format, including the "UnitedStates" link on this page. The "UnitedKingdom" was unaffected since it was not at the time an article. This conversion was not recorded as an edit on the pages on which it was performed. Support of CamelCase links was dropped with the introduction of Phase II software in January 2002, although almost all such links had already been removed by then.

The first UuU edit survived because the page only received one edit between the time that it was created and Misplaced Pages's conversion to the Phase II software. That edit was in May 2001 and turned the page into a redirect to U, where it remained until it was discovered as containing Misplaced Pages's earliest surviving edit in 2004. It was moved to the Misplaced Pages namespace in 2006. Browne has not edited the page since its creation; he has deeded all his contributions to Misplaced Pages, including the initial revisions of this page, into the public domain.

In December 2010, earlier archives were discovered by Tim Starling, though many of these edits are not present in Misplaced Pages page histories. The earliest edit found in these archives was made to HomePage, which read "This is the new WikiPedia!", while the first article created was WikiPedia.

In December 2008, Jimmy Wales claimed to have made Misplaced Pages's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!", but no such edit appears in Starling's archives, and Starling himself has speculated that the edit might have been made on a test wiki from January 10 that was later deleted. After hearing of the 2019 importations, Wales retold this story, claiming to have deleted a lot of stuff "on the hard drive" to explain the absence of the edit. The edit was recreated in 2021 and sold as a non-fungible token (NFT).

See also

  • Browne would use the eiffel.demon.co.uk domain until January 18, 2001, making a total of 22 edits. These edits are inaccessible through Special:Contributions due to bug 323, which prevents edits from usernames that start with a lower-case letter from appearing in Special:Contributions. (Lists of early edits affected by this bug are at User:Nemo bis/Bug 323 revisions).

Notes

  1. ^ Domain names were treated like IP addresses by UseModWiki, indicating an anonymous user from a server with the given domain name, so neither "office.bomis.com" nor "eiffel.demon.co.uk" were proper usernames. ScottMoonen would be the first true named user later on January 16.
  2. The first 10 were, in order, HomePage, WikiPedia, PhilosophyAndLogic, UnitedStates, PopularMusic, SportS, MathematicsAndStatistics, CountriesOfTheWorld, AaA, and AfghanistaN.
  3. The camelcased "UnitedKingdom" would not be created until 2005, long after camelcased links became obsolete.
  4. The Main Page is not considered an article.

References

  1. KeptPages
  2. CamelCase
  3. ^ Starling rclog
  4. eiffel.demon.co.uk (January 16, 2001). "SportS". Starling diff_log. Wikimedia Foundation.
  5. Eiffel (September 24, 2016). "User talk:Eiffel". Misplaced Pages. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved July 21, 2019.
  6. ^ Lih p. 64
  7. eiffel.demon.co.uk (January 16, 2001). "UuU". Starling diff_log. Wikimedia Foundation.
  8. JimboWales (February 6, 2001). "AaA". Misplaced Pages. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved July 21, 2019.
  9. Farmbrough, Rich (February 16, 2005). "UnitedKingdom". Wikpedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 8 November 2022.
  10. office.bomis.com (January 15, 2001). "HomePage". Starling diff_log. Wikimedia Foundation.
  11. Starling, Tim (January 14, 2011). ""Hello world?"". WikiEN-l. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved July 19, 2019.

Bibliography

  • Lih, Andrew (2009). The Misplaced Pages REVOLUTION: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. New York, New York: Hyperion. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6.
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