Wikipedia:UuU

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.^[1] 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.^[2]

 

UuU was created on January 16, 2001, by Roger Browne under the name^[a] eiffel.demon.co.uk in the surviving edit. It was the 11th page created on the English Wikipedia,^[b] and the first not created by office.bomis.com.^[a][3] Browne had made the first non-Bomis edit to Wikipedia eight minutes earlier^[3] by adding bullet points and orienteering to the list on the article SportS.^[4] 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.^[5]

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'.^[6] 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.^[6]

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,^[7] but was converted by a UseModWiki script into a free link later in 2001.

Listing countries using this method was soon deprecated; the page CountriesU was created on January 21,^[3] and on February 6 Jimmy Wales noted that use of the similar page AaA was "now discouraged".^[8] 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.^[c] 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!",^[10] while the first article^[d] created was WikiPedia.^[3]

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.^[11] 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).

• 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).

• 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.