First Drafts of History

October 16, 2014 8:30 PM

First Drafts of History
This Tumblr consists of the earliest extant versions of various Wikipedia articles. It's easy to overlook what an ambitious project Wikipedia is in its design, and the way in which its articles have been built bit by bit into extraordinarily useful resources from often very modest and unpromising beginnings. It's interesting as well to see how the editorial voice and organizational structure common on current articles have evolved over time. If you have suggestions for interesting articles to examine, let me know.

Role: Creator

posted by Horace Rumpole (2 comments total)

Thanks to this, I now know that muppets are "false animals". I will never be fooled again.
posted by Think_Long at 8:13 AM on October 17, 2014

It could be helpful to elaborate a little on "earliest extant versions of Wikipedia articles" - these are from August 2001 or later, but people had been working on articles since January 2001. There are just a lot of inaccessible initial versions because of software changes along the way.

You may also be interested in the Nostalgia Wikipedia, a browsable snapshot from December 2001!

I've been editing since October 2001, and it's been fun to grow up alongside the project. Everyone was nice to each other in the very early days; it was amusing and interesting to play a game together of trying to write down the sum of human knowledge from scratch.
posted by dreamyshade at 4:06 AM on October 18, 2014 [2 favorites]