Wikipedia:Historical archive

This page is a co-ordination point for pages that were previously active, but have become obsolete and archived. Regular articles are not archived here or elsewhere because their previous versions may be viewed in the history tab.

Note these pages are preserved primarily for historical interest. Policies contained within may be out-dated.

All page histories still contain their original revisions, with some dating back to Wikipedia's early days. This page itself was created in March 2004 under the title "Wikipedia:Archive" and was moved to its current name in January 2008 to avoid conflicts with the shortcut WP:ARCHIVE, as WP shortcuts had recently been incorporated into the Wikipedia namespace.

Encyclopedia content

• /Complete list of encyclopedia topics – a list of over 100,000 topics generated by Larry Sanger in October 2001, from a number of sources including Wikipedia, as a stimulus for future article subjects
• /Explore, created on 17 January 2001 as HowCanIExploreWikiPedia, a page suggesting ways of getting around
• /Politics/Wanted – a list of requested politics articles from 2001–2
• /ReviewRequests – a 2001 page to draw attention to pages needing review
• /UNICODE - a discussion from October 2001 and sporadically until 2004 about using Unicode characters in Wikipedia
• /Wikipedia arranged by topic – a proposed category scheme
• /WikiReader – an early version of what became the Books namespace

Brilliant prose

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BrilliantProse was a system started by Larry Sanger in January 2001 to recognize Wikipedia's best content, an ad hoc collection of articles added to the page by various editors. It later evolved into Wikipedia:Featured articles.

• Refreshing brilliant prose – A review of all brilliant prose articles was held in late 2003
  • Refreshing brilliant prose - History and religion
  • Refreshing brilliant prose - People and culture
  • Refreshing brilliant prose - Science
  • Refreshing brilliant prose - Others

Imported pictures

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In 2004–5 these lists were used to keep track of images imported to the project from other websites. Almost all were later deleted for not matching Wikipedia's image license requirements.

• Pictures from cityoflondon.gov.uk
• Pictures from greenparty.org.uk
• Pictures from snp.org
• Pictures from www.scottishsocialistparty.org
• Pictures from southwarkphotolibrary.co.uk
• Pictures from conservatives.org.uk
• Pictures from libdems.org.uk
• Images from Amazon.com
• Pictures from pixelquelle.de
• Pictures from PA Photos Ltd

Other image collections

• /September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/In Memoriam and its talk page – mostly preserved for their page histories

WikiProjects

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Discussions which led to the creation of WikiProjects as a way of collaborating on articles. The first WikiProject set up was WikiProject Sports, on 25 September 2001.

• Wikipedia teamwork – early musings on collaboration
• WikiProject proposal – an early blueprint for WikiProjects, written by Manning Bartlett
• WikiProject Concepts and its subpages – an early idea for a WikiProject

Policy proposals and discussions

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• Approval mechanism - a proposal from September 2001 for a system of quality assurance and marking for Wikipedia articles, which was discussed for the next four years
• Naming conventions (slogans) - a short-lived de facto convention on how to deal with the titles of articles about slogans, which existed from June 2003 to November 2005
• Naming policy poll - Poll which took place in May 2004, on how policy should address place names which differ between their official form and common form among speakers of English
• Notability - most if not all of the Wikipedia-wide guideline/policy proposals, and development-influential essays, relating to notability in some way or another, with their active development lifespans, and notes
• PolicyPolicy – an early discussion on policy enforcement
• RefactoringPolicy – an early discussion on how and where discussion of articles should be conducted
• Rules to consider – the earliest discussions of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, including the first edits to that page
• Summary of the debate about the neutral point of view – mostly preserved for its page history
• To delete or not to delete – debate on deletion (May–July 2001)
• What's in, what's out - venue for discussing what Wikipedia should or shouldn't include (April 2004–December 2005)

System logs

Pages that were used to record various system actions before the logs became special pages (2002–4).

• Block log
• Deletion log
• Bureaucrat log
• Protection log
• Upload log

Projects and processes

• /Blocked IPs – a list of blocked IPs during the UseModWiki era, mostly preserved for its page history
• /Categories for deletion/unresolved – index of category deletion discussions ongoing during 2004–5
• /Centralized discussion template log
• /Changing attribution for an edit – until 2005 it was possible to request that edits made while logged out be assigned to your user account
• /Conflicts between users - a short-lived venue for dispute resolution which ran from January to March 2004
• /List of administrators by edit count – from 2006
• Offline reports – from 2004, analyzing aspects of articles, generated periodically from an offline copy of the database. A predecessor of Wikipedia:Maintenance
• /Self-linking pages – an old maintenance project
• /Substub – a definition of our very shortest pages and accompanying /Template:Substub (2004–6)
• /Votes for deletion/Lists – a proposal to delete a lot of list pages en masse that didn't reach critical mass

Process templates

• /Template:COTW – a template used to mark an article that was up for collaboration of the week
• /Template:Deletedpage – a template that was used to mark articles which had been deleted and protected against re-creation
• /Template:Noncompliant – a template that was used to tag articles that violated multiple policies
• /Template:Totally-disputed – a template that was used to tag articles whose neutrality and accuracy were disputed

Features

• /Edit lock – description of a feature of Wikipedia when it ran UseModWiki
• /Common words, searching for which is not possible – old search related issues
• /Lag – various complaints and possible solutions to the lag problem on Wikipedia, from 2002–03. Currently, complaints about lag are more typically aired on meta, IRC, and Discord ;-)
• Old sandbox-related history:
  • /Earliest sandbox history and its talk page
  • /Sandbox and its talk page
  • /Sandpit
• /Search engine commentary – comments on the search engine before February 2002
• /Unsuccessful searches (2002) – a log of unsuccessful searches in July 2002

Social

• /Friends of Wikipedia – a list of sites that link to Wikipedia
• /New user log – self-introductions by users who arrived in 2004–2007

Site interface

• /International Wikipedia/TextToTranslate – the first translation project for the Wikipedia interface
• /Main Page/CSS – page history of an old design for the Main Page, along with its talk page
• /MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage – an old MediaWiki page
• /Petition for the return of the Old Wikipedia – a petition to change the standard skin back to the older style, before Monobook
• /Recent Changes – old text which used to be at the top of Recent Changes

Miscellany

• /How to draw a diagram with Microsoft Word
• /How to draw a diagram with OpenOffice.org Draw
• /How to draw a diagram with OpenOffice.org Writer
• /GNE project files (and its subpages), related to the GNU encyclopedia project, largely preserved for their page history
• /Abandoned help pages from 2001, relating to the page now at Help:Editing
• /Wiki ASCII codes, an old attempt to make a list of ASCII codes that could be used universally

Templates for this archive

Use {{whac}} and {{whai}} to tag collections and items within this archive respectively.

See also

• Wikipedia:First 100 pages
• Category:Redirects with old history – redirects with old article content in their revision history, including the earliest 2001 versions of many articles
• Historical pages on Meta