Meta:Historical

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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

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

In the early days of Wikipedia, several people were working on the GNU encyclopedia project based on Richard Stallman's essay The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource. They used Wikipedia to develop some of their ideas. Stallman eventually recommended that people focus their efforts on Nupedia and Wikipedia, and so this project never got off the ground. These are the GNE Project's files:

Some GNE volunteers, including Tom Chance and Robert Scott, also began to develop a live system to experiment with the ideas being suggested on the mailing list. A half-working system is still online.

Meta:Historical

Contents

Index

Log of recent changes

Proposed

Events

Essays

Exhibits

Unsorted Exhibits

The GNE Project Files

See also