Meta:Historical

Historical pages

This is an index to pages of historical interest, documented and cross-referenced. Historical pages should be documented in the {{historical header}} template, and added to the relevant index and category.

This page includes old Wikipedia pages and discussions that are obsolete or no longer serve an active purpose.

For similar pages not yet listed here, see Wikimedian and the indexes below.

Index

Histories

• Wikipedia (1983–2024)
• Wikipedia timeline
• Wikipedia logo (2001–2003)
• User rights (2004–2008)
• Stewards (2005–2010)

Essays

• Wikipedia commentary
• Moving commentary out of Wikipedia (2001)
• English Wikipedia's historical archive (current)

Old indexes (being removed)

• Events
• Users

Historical pages

• Archives index: list of Category:Archives pages by creation date
• Deleted

Log of recent changes

Proposed

• 2 July 2005: Wikimedia Quarto/Retro
• 19 July 2005: H.J.saga
• 3 September 2005: Announcement about my involvement in Wikipedia and Nupedia--Larry Sanger
• 3 September 2005: Status quo
• 3 September 2005: Wikimedia cache strategy evolution during 2003
• 3 September 2005: Separate database and web servers
• 3 September 2005: Cache bugs
• 3 September 2005: Foundation-L Proposal
• 3 September 2005: Upgrade discussion April 2004
• 3 September 2005: Hardware ordered January 2004

Events

• 9 January 2007: International logo contest
• 17 January 2007: Logo suggestions
• 24 January 2007: Fundraising/2006
• 8 February 2010: Logo/History
• 18 March 2021: List of Wikimedia birthdays

Essays

• 27 August 2008: Final international solution
• 27 August 2008: Visions
• 27 August 2008: Get rid of subpages entirely
• 27 August 2008: Threats/yue
• 28 August 2008: Cutting each other a bit of slack

Exhibits

• Monitoring

  /Why Wikipedia runs slow (used sporadically, and then all at one in July 2009)

• /Wikipedia and Nupedia :

  Adding Wikipedia articles to Nupedia – back when Nupedia was going to be a "quality check" on Wikipedia

  Chalkboard candidates -- the Chalkboard was a wiki experiment of the Nupedia project

  Nupedia Translation -- using Wikipedia to translate Nupedia articles?

• /MediaWiki :

  WikipediaReasonable -- User:SunirShah opines that a wiki isn't appropriate for an encyclopedia project. Have we proven him wrong, yet? :)

  WhichWikiShouldWeUse -- early discussion of switching from UseModWiki to other wiki software. Clifford Adams made it a moot point by incorporating the desired features into UseModWiki.

  ArbitraryLinkingDiscussion -- Discussions over switching from camel case to free links

• /Community :

  Larry's Wedding Card -- Larry Sanger gets married and gets a lovely wiki-wedding card

  OldWikiPediaLogo -- a brief history of the Wikipedia logo, with a diversion into American ethno-centricism

• /Humor and General Interest :

  Talk:List of famous people who had sex with animals -- a discussion about a useless list which evaded the deletionists for so long, it is hard to break its lucky streak.

  The best president to have a beer with -- a thread from w:Talk:Ronald Reagan that got a bit out of hand in June 2002 and spawned a discussion on meta.

  Campaign Against Covert Action -- the old headquarters of a covert group of unknown membership watching for covert action

• /Policy :

  Knocking her dead one on the nose each and every double trey – brief discussion about the inclusion of slang definitions.

  German names of places taken by Poland – an old thread of a debate which spawned a whole family of edit wars... which continue to this day.

• Meta-Wiki project pages, processes, tests etc.
  • /Meta/MetaWikipedia utilities/user IDs to be deleted: context unknown, apparently some problems with Phase II initial implementation.

Unsorted Exhibits

• Personal essays :

  Latino Unity

  Corporation SOS | The Magnificent 5 – by Antonio

  Dreaming doubt

• /Discussions :

  Censorship

  How to write about film (KQ and whoever cares to respond)

  Markup vs MetaForming

  Use pinyin not Wade-Giles

  Talk:Benjamin Netanyahu On Terrorism

The GNE Project Files

Pages related to the early GNU encyclopedia project (GNE project) , can now be found in the English Wikipedia historical archive.

See also

• w:Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people