 All right Y'all should be quiet now Good job. You're getting there Okay, so I've been editing since October 2001 and so when we start having different anniversaries of Wikipedia Years, I start thinking I should talk about that That's weird very very few of us are still editing from the very early days And this is actually becoming a lot more important because 15 years is long enough for me to start forgetting What it was like, which is a good disclaimer that everything I'm talking about here is based on my memory And my entire point is that we need to be doing a history project about ourselves that we need to be seeing Wikipedia as part of history and as having its own history rather than being a somehow Some of human knowledge outside of human knowledge I'm gonna try to make this point that you all as a community We need to figure out how to do this, okay, so and I can't do it by myself. I Need other people's memories too. Yeah If we try to think about Wikipedia as outside of history Wikipedia is not going to make sense like we can't reason about it unless we remember where it comes from and who started it, but not who started it in a Organizational way like that story is written down, but who are the first people who started writing articles? Like what was the first troll problem? How did we deal with it? What were our first fight? What did we do? How did that affect us? and If you look at the article on Wikipedia about Wikipedia the main one skips over the first, you know 10 years with some statistics. It's a very long article. It has to cover a lot of ground There's a separate history of Wikipedia article But even that article has a number of small sections about each year That often have like what new features are released that year or you know We started working with the arbitration committee that year It doesn't really give you the sense of like what was it actually like like like who are these editors? And what were they worried about and how did it feel? What did we care about and there's one book? I know of that talks about this and goes into some of the early like actual discussions about rules and things Which is the Wikipedia revolution by Andrew Lee But it's a book on the shelf, you know, we don't like go off and read Books on the shelf that much we go read the things that are online and the things that are part of our culture and community and active discussions And then we start forgetting how completely weird Wikipedia really really is And so my suggestion for all of you is to go to this sub site. That's pretty much forgotten by a lot of people nostalgia.wikipedia.org Which has a copy from December 2001 And it's hilarious and strange and at the bottom of the main page. You should all look at it right now if you want There's a little note that says sorry we had to protect this page We didn't want to but people kept editing it Like it was just like beginning to develop that we had to like protect the main page If you went to recent changes You could just read all of the recent changes from the past couple days Every day if you felt like it I did this for like months I just read all of the recent changes. It was that small and there's funny formatting things You'll notice the home page if you go look at it is capital H and capital P Which is an artifact of the original software system use mod wiki where if you wanted to link to another page You'd be like a camel case link is what it was called. There's these funny little awkward Software things trying to figure out software. That would work. Uh, I was 14 years old I was just messing around. It was hilarious And I was and I can look at my user page from December 2001 And I'm talking about all these weird inside jokes that 14 year olds have It made no sense But I was also just really delighted to be somewhere where adults were respecting my contributions as Just a person because when you're 14, you don't have a whole lot of influence in the world You can feel kind of frustrated. You sure all of us did but like grown-ups were taking me seriously If I was like doing serious work And they're really nice to me strange Yeah, and It was a weird idea like I want you to try to imagine Right now if there was no Wikipedia Like the idea of writing an encyclopedia from scratch you just opened up a page This is literally what you did you open up a page about like, you know harp I've played harp at the time and there was no article for this So I opened up the page and I started writing down stuff off the top of my head. I'm a kid, you know I'll just write down what I remember from some book. I read once and I saved the page and everyone was like Oh, thanks for starting the page. Good job There are no references like you put in like random pictures from around the internet like This is like a hilarious thing to do, you know, my mom's like, oh, what did you do today? I was like, you know, it's working on writing an encyclopedia. She was like, oh, it's cute It's just you know, everyone writing this early Wikipedia had grown up with Encyclopedias that were like a CD-ROM or a book. I'm like just the It was a joke. Like it was fun. It was a lark You know, we didn't actually think it would make sense It was just the dumbest idea. It was fun. I can't emphasize that enough And it didn't come out of nowhere, I mean a lot of us know that Newpedia was the kind of Seed project. It didn't really work. Wikipedia came out of Newpedia, which was a little more formal and well researched And I'm trying to be a little more serious about building encyclopedia, but it wasn't going very far So I thought, oh, we'll try this wiki thing But there were also other strange internet projects where random people from the year on the internet were collecting information together It was everything too And Pitchhiker's guide to the galaxy on the internet And people just come together and write stories and have fun and you know, the editors came and went between these different websites and You know on my on my talk page from 2001 There's somebody saying like plus one for something I'd edited and he was like Well, if you don't know what plus one is go over look at everything too You know convention social convention for everything too. There's just a lot of overlap between all these projects And everything too is still online uh, it has like It has more like personal stories. It's like a collection of personal stories and Each two g2 project. I don't think it's even really around anymore But like Wikipedia was one of several experiments to just like use stuff online together It was a little more straightforward Um, but I don't think it would have happened without these other funny things that were happening at the time Yeah, I read all the recent changes And that's you know, like everyone did And I'll try to explain how weird of a place it was The articles they were, you know a smattering of articles on lots of different random things There were a good number of like, you know, basic introductions like if you've never heard of, you know, Kenya I'll tell you some stuff about Kenya maybe But like there were really long complicated like in-depth articles about a few different things about philosophy Thanks to Larry Sanger A lot about poker There was a lot of articles about the simpsons There was a lot about objectivism And since September 11th had just happened There was actually a fairly like in-depth community effort to try to cover a Event as it was happening It was a very interesting early test of Wikipedia But like if you just think of like going to some website and these are like the five things that I can actually tell you Something about like this tells you something about the early people on Wikipedia But also I could be wrong. I'm forgetting. What was it? What was there back then? And the thing is we'd mostly come from slash dot You forget like the gender gap of wikipedia It wasn't It didn't come from nowhere like like it came from the gender gap of I mean originally Of like just the collaborative community sites At the time Okay, if you haven't heard of slash dot you can think of reddit They're really really really tiny because there was almost nobody just hanging out on the internet Kind of like that. Uh, there's a couple New York Times articles. There was a couple other like Press articles about haha. Look at this funny little encyclopedia project Um, but people the people from slash dot and those kinds of places where they're really the people who started editing They already had the boldness to go Talk about the random stuff off the top of their head and call it an encyclopedia Uh, and we're willing to deal with the weird syntax had some free time and stuff like that I don't remember how I found wikipedia It was almost certainly slash dot and There's a mailing list post from january 2002 Where there's a woman who's asking some ordinary question about something And at the end of her post she says like p.s. Are there no other women taking part in this? I feel a bit like i'm snuck into the boy's room smiley face Uh jimbo says yeah ruth is around uh rose parks and janet davis writes a lot I'm not sure if they're on the mailing list though. There's pink unicorn And then larry follows up and says that oh, yeah, let's not forget jhk and april and dreamy shade Uh, to name three of the more hard-working females. There's a few others too wikipedia is definitely male dominated though, which I agree is regrettable There are six of us There were hundreds and hundreds of editors And there are six of us and I didn't really notice um everyone was nice to me. I was like working um but there's not a lot of writing about the early gender gap I've never seen anyone talk about like gender gap before about 2004 It's what like I don't even remember like what was happening I don't know we should find out Yeah, and so there was this mailing list And I had never heard of mailing lists before I had no idea how to join a mailing list I kept hearing about it And I posted at the top of the recent changes page because there was a part you could edit there I thought oh, maybe somebody will see my question. I was like, how do you join the mailing list? somebody just reverted me because I was clearly posting in the wrong place And I never figured it out, you know, I went off and did other things with me the angel life and I wonder now like how might my life have been different if I got involved at governance like at that time. I have no idea so like Early governance, you had to know how to use a mailing list Which is a perfectly kind of reasonable assumption by the people at the time And Q doesn't know how to use a mailing list I don't know It's like funny cultural thing Uh There were problems. Uh, there were trolls. There were massive fights with people who were argumentative but also really good content contributors Uh, you know, there was this massive struggle over this page called Bad jokes and deleted nonsense Because when people removed vandalism that was particularly funny. They'd all put it on this one page and this page kept growing and growing and growing It was just awful Because there's all this junk on it, but nobody wanted to just like make the community decision to just delete it Or like archive it and not contribute it because everyone else having so much fun adding all the vandalism to it It was it was a fight. I don't even remember what happened with it But like what are these early stories? I don't remember them I was just editing content and fixing articles about the apollotan ice cream seriously What would if we knew more about our first fights like what would that tell us about the dna of our community? um, what would that tell us about the origins of our rules and how they've you know conglomerated over time I don't know. We should find out um There is a very incomplete list of people who joined in the first year or two Uh, the only people who remembered to add themselves to this list were the particularly active editors at the time And if you look at this almost none of them are still active very very few And almost none of them are involved in governance like who in our governance as a community in all of our different forms of governance we have You know probably hundreds of forms of governance um Who among them has the memory? Back 15 years I don't know like should we try to have more of that Or somehow find a way to teach those stories and share them like You know who will go to that page and track down all those people and interview them I'm not going to do it. I don't have time Maybe maybe you will um You know What can we learn from how they feel? Why didn't they leave? I don't know. Is that an unusual amount of attrition or normal? um Who will do this before we all forget 15 years is a long time um Who will fix the article about the history of wikipedia to actually include an editor perspective Of editor problems and in human stories. How do we help ourselves think about wikipedia? As being part of history It's not just some of human knowledge, but a very specific although very popular and very well known like Effort to do this thing like and and what can that tell us and inspire us and Inform us especially when we're having difficulty and how can we remember that we've had lots and lots of difficulty over the years Uh, yeah, maybe it's you I would like to help you because I can't do it by myself and There's like at least 10 15 more minutes in this time slot and I could keep talking about things, but I think it's for more fun to show you um some of the nostalgia wikipedia If you haven't looked at it yet There's the camel case homepage like Ah pretty awesome. The other funny thing is that this is not quite Like an exact version of the early one because this is running on media wiki It was running on I don't even remember what it was called. There were a couple different Maybe it was the first version of media wiki. There were a couple different funny software projects Uh, this is a hilarious logo that it had at the time. Um, I wonder if it'll get No But it had this quote that ended with the words carnal pleasure Which were like the most like obvious things when you were looking at this logo, you know just it was a quote about You know that humans are are have a singular passion above other animals That we the light and the continuum continual and endific in like generation of knowledge Exceeds the sheer vehemence of any carnal pleasure, whatever, but it was a really awkward logo Like this shows you just like there's a bunch of people doing random stuff. They weren't really thinking like That awkward It got changed It's funny, you know, it was covered by the gnu free documentation license at the time that You know creative commons licenses weren't really even a thing yet It was very early in the development of just what would a free content project Even look like and you know had a little definition of what is open content and free content Uh, let's see like if you clicked on one of these random links about You know an effort to divide human knowledge into few categories Hey Hey, you can learn stuff about chemistry here There's a little bit about the periodic table cool And oh, funny thing is there's all these funny like, you know break lines We didn't really have like a structure for pages like there weren't really subheadings. We just kind of added lots of of like Kind of lines of between things. So sometimes if you find an article that hasn't been edited in like 10 15 years He has like a characteristic formatting Uh, here's my user page from December 2001 Is dreamy shade aka harp girl rita mart and sometimes pritta had lots of cheesy jokes about Purple monkey dishwasher. That was real cool. And then there's there's all these like really nice notes from larry sanger and random people Oh, here's the part where it says like plus one on harp and your other harp articles. What's a plus one? See everything too All right And all these funny little Um things Uh, let's see other useful things to know about if you if you are interested in trying to tell this story We don't have edit history from several of the first few months The software that we were using didn't really like keep all the records It kept keep things for like a month and people have gone and dug up like ancient backups to try to dig through Like as much as possible, but it's still missing a lot. So if you go to my oldest edits You have something that's like the first edit to a page where it's actually, you know, like 16th edit. Um Like this weird software things where It like Thanks that my edit from 2001 removed, you know, 30,000 characters. I don't know I don't know if this is a software bug that I should report somewhere But like look at the really old edits and maybe fix those bugs uh, yeah, there was just a random page where you would like If you wanted somebody blocked you would just like add their ip to a page and hopefully somebody would get around to it Same thing if you wanted a page to be deleted just like added it to some random page and maybe somebody would take care of it Uh, you added random pictures from around the internet and then a little while a few months later somebody realized Ah, we should kind of clean that up Okay, here's here's the list of Wikipedia's in order of arrival um You know somebody later annotated it to say like this one's inactive since june 2003 um Inactive since march 2001 like who are these people like Nobody knows like Yeah, there's me And here's the history of Wikipedia article. I'll try to show you what I mean um you know in 2001 It talks about that the neutral point of view policy was formulated the slash daughters arrived. There was a media report But like what was it like? Nobody Has that even written anywhere can we even cite it to anything has anyone even done the original research on ourselves? So that we can cite it here. I don't know all right I think i'm done talking. I mean one thing I could ask about is were any of you Editing back like before 2005 and do you have like weird funny stories? I think that'd be fun Maybe you should come up here and speak with a microphone so people can see you on the internet um, so one of my favorite sort of I wasn't around at this time, but I looked up the very first uh Edit for the article on critical theory if you're a sort of philosophy or cultural study And the text of it is we're not sure what critical theory is and so we're hoping someone will come and tell us Anyone else there's a um an interest to interview people to add to the history of wikipedia, but isn't that a Antithesis of like original research like I I think what the matter at hand is like how do we get? more public awareness around the movement of wikipedia and all the projects And rather than have public news about controversy of wikipedia Is talk about what you have here is history so that a journalist can interview that and then we could use that The secret is that original research is really fun You just I mean you can't directly put it on wikipedia, but you should still do it Um, put it somewhere else somebody else can cite it That's actually one of the things I found like way late in editing wikipedia is that I actually All of my skills I learned from editing wikipedia. We're actually really good for doing original research I just put it elsewhere Okay, so I started editing not wikipedia, but wictionary in october of 2003 And my first entry there was somebody in the tea room wanted to know about the word successism And I dug into this and I found roots in japanese and I most have spent several hours making one, you know two-line entry and the The thing that I think made it stick for me was looking back at that article in a day or so And somebody in belgium Had cleaned it up had formatted it had had made it real And had welcomed me and I'm going why is somebody in belgium care about my work? I guess the other weird old weird old story I could tell here is Just a few months later in january of 2004 The man here who is now my husband started editing wictionary also And that was how we met any more stories Even if it's like before 2007 Come tell us Have a quick comment First, so I'm guillaume first of all. Thank you for your presentation I'm I'm not from around that time. I joined in 2005 But I consider myself a wiki archaeologist, which is a really fun thing to do you can I mean if you look at the very first version of articles you find very funny things On the french wikipedia the first version of the Apple article says Apple is a fruit and and that was that was it If you look at the the first version of the the b article on the english wikipedia it says Like b is an insect and It likes to dance or something like that and that's all I know and and that's all I know is actually in the in the article So it's a very Very funny hobby And and so about the the point about original original research We don't have to put that up on wikipedia itself and there's a lot of wiki archaeology stuff on meta And so I invite everyone who's interested in doing that In looking at meta contacting me contacting you and I'm sure we can do something about this Yeah, I started in 2004 as an anonymous editor just fixing you know typos and things I didn't create an account until 2005 but What strikes me as as the biggest change that is to you know taking place in that time is the death of the of the eventualism versus immediateism like Uh You know split like I mean there there there really is no eventualism left like I mean this is The top five site in the world now or something but you know even even just a decade ago There was an idea that well, you know, we don't really need to do a good job right now We'll just we'll just deal with it later. And I think that that has has You know completely changed now like there there's a strong focus on you know getting the content immediately I think that's that that has changed the nature of the of the culture as well as you know what the output is Yeah, it's a really good point so um back in 2001 um My friend anatoly vorobay user av at the time Told me he he discovered it through slash dot and was editing and told me. Hey, there's a bunch of crazy people Going to write an encyclopedia on a wiki I already knew what wikis were. I was a programmer. We were using it at the time And he was like, yeah, they're gonna do it on a wiki anyone could edit anything at any time At the time I was already online for about 10 years from a little before the public internet So I thought I I know the internet. I know how things work. It's a crazy idea. It'll never work, but I was curious so I Came and looked around wikipedia.com as it was And you know, um, obviously being being, um, sure this couldn't possibly work. I wanted to test it So I looked at articles and topics. I knew something about like Hebrew language and Hebrew literature um, and of course um, I found mistakes And that's when I discovered the awesome power of cunningham's law Which states the easiest way to get a correct answer On the internet is to post a wrong answer It's profoundly true I discovered those edits Those those mistakes. I was not at all intending to contribute I was a skeptic coming to confirm my view that this can't possibly work But I saw this small mistake in the description of Hebrew grammar And I clicked the edit button and fixed it Then I fixed a bunch of other things and then I added a couple of things and before I knew it I was a wikipedia A few months later, I kind of wandered off and stopped contributing but then in 2003 Just to show you that I don't learn lessons very easily in 2003 some math student in a in a israeli university uh translated the interface strings into Hebrew Which at the time was all you needed to do to create a new wikipedia You you would translate the strings and send brian veber an email and go hey make a new one and he did That guy that same day wrote the first article on Hebrew wikipedia Which was mathematics because he was a mathematics student Then he sent an email on a couple of israeli mainly saying hey So now there's a Hebrew wikipedia too Then I felt really smug and I was like listen. I know about wikipedia. It's a crazy idea somehow It works in english, but let me tell you it'll never work in Hebrew There's only seven million speakers not a strong volunteer culture Most of us speak english forget it, you know, don't even try I wrote this really Long email explaining the many ways in which it couldn't possibly work trust me I know I'm from the internet. I've been around and I've edited wikipedia After sending that email I felt kind of crappy and I was I like reigned all over this man's parade And so I said okay, it's not going to work But if it's not if it doesn't work let it not be because I refused to chip in to pitch in And so I did I went to the completely empty Hebrew wikipedia And said okay, this guy's a math student He's already recruited a couple of his computer science students So I'm going to write about what I know and I wrote the article about Homer the greek poet Nothing at all was there on classics And then I found that after writing the article it was full of red links So I had to write the article about the iliad and the odyssey and epic poetry etc. And here I am today Um, it's working So, uh, thank you so much britta for that excellent session I'm gonna try so I'm actually my name is pete foresight As wikipedia is celebrating its 15th anniversary. I'm actually celebrating my 10th. So this last session was awesome for me I'd like to try something Right now. I'm gonna list off some of the terms that I think we heard in that last session So just listen closely for a second metawiki afcom arbcom camel case ryan viber Okay, so now I want everyone here who doesn't know what every single one of those things means to raise your hand Okay, so the session i'm gonna lead after the break that we're about to take this one's for you So we're gonna we're gonna have a panel up here where we're gonna talk to some people who are new to wikipedia But who have uh an interest in it because of their other professional work or their other passions Um, so if if you're one of the people who had a little trouble following all the ins and outs of the beginnings of wikipedia Hopefully this one will uh, we'll speak to you So yeah, we have about I think a 10 minute break. All right, and then we'll be back and there's snacks in the back