User:Hex/Notes/Ancient things

There's a lot of interesting forgotten stuff out there. These are my finds, some of which I'll eventually be putting into the Wikipedia:Historical archive.

Project pages

Some of the very oldest pages still exist in hidden form. They were what we'd now think of as policy or guidance pages, and were created before there were namespaces in what's now called article space. Later on editors cut-and-paste moved pages from their old CamelCase titles to new ones and converted the old titles into redirects. While articles usually had a straightforward transition in this way, the project page titles sometimes got re-redirected several times as project policies and guidelines evolved and lost any direct relation to their original content.

If you're looking at one now, it's almost certainly at least partially thanks to the tireless work of Graham87, who's spent years painstakingly reassembling early page histories from fragments scattered across a variety of inconsistent archive sources. Kudos.

Wikipedia:What is a wiki (formerly at WhatIsaWiki) - January 2001
SummarizeDiscussion - January 2001
WikiPedians - January 2001
BrilliantProse - January 2001 (see the current version for a detailed history of the precursor to Featured Articles)
HowDoesOneEditaPage - February 2001 (shortly after its 18th birthday someone with no understanding of history tried to have it deleted. They failed)
NamingConventions - February 2001
WhatIsaWiki - February 2001
DisRuption - March 2001

Pages containing or linking to obscure revisions

User:Dbenbenn/bad user pages - features a lot of users who only edited in 2001
Wikipedia talk:Unicode/Archive 1 - 2001-3
User:Nemo bis/Bug 323 revisions - page revisions made inaccessible through the contributions page due to errors in the software transition of 2002
Wikipedia:Usemod article histories - pages which were imported slightly later

Glitches

Duplicates on AtlasShrugged, which was de-CamelCased in 2002:
- 09:27, 26 February 2001‎ - old title / new title‎
- 05:47, 1 February 2001 - old title / new title
An edit from July 2002 attributed to "imported>10.58" instead of a user

Discussions

meta:Meta:Historical/Archives index - lots of pages that were moved to Meta as a way of separating them from articles, before we had a project namespace for that exact purpose
Wikipedia:Village pump/Wikipedia chat - 2002
Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki (archive) - 2002
User talk:Cumguzzler - January 2003
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wikicide - June 2003
Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy/Bans and blocks - July 2003-March 2004
User talk:EntmootsOfTrolls/on ban pages - August 2003
User:Jimbo Wales/Ceasefire - August 2003
User:Jimbo Wales/Pushing To 1.0/archive and Wikipedia talk:Pushing to 1.0/Archive 2 - 2004
Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards - long-forgotten user group active in 2004-6
User:Tim Starling/Richardchilton IRC log - March 2004

Tasks and reports

Category talk:Newspapers/Tree - a manual attempt to build a tree of newspaper categories, December 2005
User:R3m0t/Reports - an abandoned effort from 2005 to resolve orphaned talk pages
Wikipedia:Changing attribution for an edit - from 2003-5 you could request that an edit you made while logged out be assigned to your account
Some abandoned projects to categorize templates; interesting to see how many links are now red
- User:Thetrick/uncattemplist (revision with items beginning T) - 2008
- User:Thetrick/uncattemplist (revision with items beginning V) - 2008
- User:Thetrick/uncattemplist (revision with items beginning X-Z) - 2008
- User:Tim.landscheidt/Sandbox/Uncategorized templates - 2013
- User:DH85868993/Uncategorized templates - 2014

Bugs and features

Wikipedia:Squashed bugs (2002)
Wikipedia:Phase II bug reports (2002-3)
Wikipedia talk:Bugzilla (2003-4)
Wikipedia:Ignored feature requests - 2002-4

Buried failures

Ideas which didn't make it and got turned into redirects.

Wikipedia:Metadirectory, one person's series of mini indexes to guidance pages - February 2004
Wikipedia:Principles of Definition - an attempt to define a "policy" based on Ancient Greek philosophy? Yeah... no. April 2004

Miscellany

The state of the article "How-to" on 29 January 2003 (which survived in progressively smaller form until it was converted to a redirect in 2021) - a charming nutshell of the vibe of the project in its early days