Wikipedia:UuU

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 Wikipedia (and hence any Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia to software that kept page histories reliably. It was discovered as having Wikipedia's earliest surviving edit in 2004, and was moved to the "Wikipedia" namespace, gaining its prefix, in 2006. As the author has waived copyright for all his contributions to Wikipedia, the original revision is in the public domain.

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

Background

Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia, and the first not created by office.bomis.com. Browne had made the first non-Bomis edit to Wikipedia 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[1]

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 Wikipedia is:

* UnitedKingdom
* [[United States]]
* Uruguay

The second line was originally "* UnitedStates" without brackets, but was converted by a UseModWiki 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.

Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia'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 Wikipedia's earliest surviving edit in 2004. It was moved to the Wikipedia namespace in 2006. Browne has not edited the page since its creation; he has deeded all his contributions to Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia'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

• Wikipedia's oldest articles
• Wikipedia:First 100 pages
• History of Wikipedia
• The static version of the original UuU edit from the Nostalgia Wikipedia

• And as it appears on Joseph Reagle's 10K Redux

• 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).

Bibliography

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