Wikipedia's first 10,000 edits

Joseph Reagle, author of the excellent history of Wikipedia, Good Faith Collaboration (review coming soon) sez, "When I wrote my book on Wikipedia's culture and history, many sources, such as emails from founders, Nupedia-l archives, and (most sadly) the early days of Wikipedia contributions were lost to bit rot. But thanks to a recent discovery of some old log files by Tim Starling, I've been able to roughly reconstruct the first 10,000 edits to Wikipedia (about 6 weeks)."

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Technology

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

pKp

“There are two kind of arguments for the existence of God: ObviouslyBadArgumentsForTheExistenceOfGod, and TraditionallyRespectableArgumentsForTheExistenceOfGod. We shan’t speculate on whether the latter belong to the former.”

Hahahaha, oh man. Wikipedia sure has come a long way since. Gotten a lot less funny, though.
- Shay Guy
  
  I’m saddened to see that the Gadsby article is no longer a lipogram. Yeah, I get the arguments against making it so, but still.
  
  On that note…
Anonymous

Somebody really knew about Atlas Shrugged.
Anonymous

bit rot? really? I thought the ECC on hard drives was better than this. Its only been 10 years!
airshowfan

I thought the laws of wiki would break down at some point as you worked backwards trying to reconstruct how Wikipedia originated from nothing. “Well, we can get to the 10^(-37)th edit or so, but before that, things start to look fuzzy…”
Oskar

Dude, that’s a lot of Atlas Shrugged.
Anonymous

ayespy. he works hard. sometimes for love, sometimes for renumeration. sometimes he fences, sometimes he earns $$

;)