Wikipedia:UuU
This page, Wikipedia:UuU (originally in the main namespace as UuU), contains the earliest surviving edit on the English Wikipedia (and hence any Wikipedia and project in the Wikimedia Foundation), which was made on January 16, 2001 at 20:08 UTC. The static version and URL of the edit itself may be found in the full history of this page.
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!" The first article created was WikiPedia.
UuU was created as a CamelCase hack to create a link to an article that would otherwise be named 'U'. Such an article name was impossible due to the UseModWiki software in use at the time. The software only rendered CamelCased words as article links rather than rendering double-bracketed phrases as links (it did not support free links), and so the shortest possible article name was three letters long: a capital letter, followed by at least one lowercase letter, followed by at least one capital letter. 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.
The wikitext of the page's first version as given by the Nostalgia Wikipedia is:
* UnitedKingdom * [[United States]] * Uruguay
The first line would have been rendered as a link, and the second one was changed automatically by the UseModWiki software, since the free links feature did not exist when that edit was made. The edit's second line originally contained "UnitedStates" (without brackets). The article was intended to help fill out an alphabetical list of countries. Roger Browne, who made the original edit, explained further:
This shows that UuU was not the first edit ever (United States had already been created), but definitely one of the first made. In December 2008, Jimmy Wales stated that he made Wikipedia's first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!"
See also
- Wikipedia's oldest articles
- The static version of the original UuU edit from the Nostalgia Wikipedia
- Eiffel, previously known as eiffel.demon.co.uk, was the user who made the first UuU edit. Note that the user's latter 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. (A list of early edits affected by this bug, including the only other surviving edit by Eiffel, is at User:Nemo bis/Bug 323 revisions/Anonymous)