Oldest page that was created in the Wikipedia namespace and not moved from mainspace: Wikipedia:User preferences help, first recorded edit 27 January 2002 but probably created the day before[ai]
These are current as of 7 July 2024. Those who are interested in updating them can use the special searches provided as refnotes to find more: simply change the archive number to one more than the numbers listed here. If you find anything, keep going up until you stop finding more, and then that's the new record. There are no pages with archives in the TimedText talk namespace.
Longest talk page thread: unknown
Views
The most viewed pages of Wikipedia before 2007 remain unknown, though the
multiyear ranking of most viewed pages gives views for top 100 pages since 2007.
Most visited article that is not about a website nor related specifically to the United States:
Elizabeth II, followed by
India and then
World War II
Single-day views
Typically, the most visited page on a single day is the
Main Page. From 21 July to 16 August 2016, the page averaged 58,900,479 views per day, far more views than any other page.
Longest time between site-wide edits not due to software issues or blackouts:[u] 68,424 seconds (19 hours and 24 seconds) between an edit to
UnitedStates by
office.bomis.com on 23:47:31, 15 January 2001 and another edit to UnitedStates by office.bomis.com on 18:47:55, 16 January 2001
The MediaWiki software limits the length of page titles to 255 bytes, thus some titles that would be longer than the ones in the list below are not included. For instance, the full title of When the Pawn... would be 445 bytes.
Longest-running VfD with participation:
WikidPad, from 12 January 2005 to
26 July 2020 (15 years, 196 days)
Longest-running AfD:
Disposal orbit, from 3 January 2006 to 8 July 2022 (16 years, 186 days)
Slowest speedy delete:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Griphennus, nominated on 3 December 2005, deleted the next day, along with AfD page (which was deleted without being closed) on 4 December; undeleted to fix a redlink and closed "speedy delete" on 10 July 2024 (18 years, 220 days)
With a never-deleted AfD:
Brent's T.V., nominated on 2 January 2006 and closed "speedy delete" on 7 July 2022 (16 years, 186 days)
Statistics
First daily deletion logpage:
25 December 2004 (to which 22 debates were automatically transcluded on 29 December).
Most AfDs in a single AfD daily logpage: 251, on
19 December 2005 (the second highest number, 238, was on the
day before).
Fewest AfDs in a single AfD daily logpage:[cs] 0, on
22 February 2005, the "Stolen Day" in which server issues prevented the logpage from being filled.
Fewest AfDs in a single AfD daily logpage that wasn't due to server problems: 16, on
17 May 2014.
The following information is drawn from
User:JPxG/Oracle/All, and only cover AfD nominations after the August 2005 format switch (prior to which deletions were processed at
WP:VfD).
Most !votes in an AfD discussion: 301, on
Esoteric programming languages (March 2006), in a gargantuan 60-page batch nomination
Most !votes in a non-batched AfD: 293, on
Brian Chase (Wikipedia hoaxer) (December 2005). In total there were 146 keeps, 46 deletes, and 124 merges. While the discussion was closed as "keep", for some time afterwards the page oscillated between being an article and a redirect in an edit war whose distinguished participants included
Jimbo Wales. It is currently (as of 2021) a redirect.
Most "keep" !votes in an AfD: 146, on
the same AfD.
Most "keep" votes in a VfD: 226, on
Flying Spaghetti Monster (August 2005). In total there were 238 votes, including 9 "delete"s, 3 "merge"s, and 1 "moo".
Longest undetected patent nonsense page outside of projectspace:
Talk:Sombrero Galaxy/ ("the sobrereo galaxy fat ") from 22 January 2018 to 21 October 2023 (5 years, 272 days)
^The 21:16, 16 January 2001 revision was the first time the
edit summary was used on Wikipedia.
^Users with ID number 0 are reserved for IP addresses.
^UseModWiki had ID numbers of its own, but those appear to have been internally inconsistent and are disregarded by MediaWiki. The lowest ID number found in the Starling logs is 111, which is shared between several domain names that do not appear to have been related.
^Jack Lemmon was created on 16 June 2001 and updated on the day after his death.
^Dale Earnhardt was created on
22 February 2001. He had died three days earlier on 18 February. The January–August 2001 logs show that
Recent celebrity deaths was created on 14 March 2001, with Earnhardt being one of the first entries.
^Many victims of the
September 11 attacks had articles created on them in the aftermath. Most of them were later deleted and moved to the former
Sep11wiki, among the earliest being Tara Creamer on
12 September 2001, the day after her death. However, none of them had articles before the attacks.
^
abcPhase I software (UseModWiki) had no way to natively include images, so images had to be linked with their raw URLs from external sources. Phase II software had no upload history, so a new version of a file
wiped out the previous revision. The modern Upload Wizard arrived with Phase III software on 20 July 2002.
^Meta was launched on 9 November and tested Manske's Phase II script before it was adopted by the English Wikipedia on 25 January 2002. UseModWiki had no way to natively upload images, so at that time one had to upload an image to Meta and copy and paste the resultant URL into the desired Wikipedia page. The meta file now
shadows the Commons file, which dates to 24 March 2005.
^Featured articles were formerly known as brilliant prose.
^Placed in
SandBox by
PhillipHankins, it is unclear as to whether the test actually worked at the time, although subsequent discussion appears to imply that it did not; earlier discussion had used double-brackets, but in the context of demonstrating what free links were rather than trying to actually be links. This is the first edit that was an effort to actually produce a free link. About a minute later he would change the content to uppercase "Test" and then lowercase "denmark", making
Denmark the first content page to be the attempted target of a free link. UseModWiki would run a script later in 2001 that retroactively
converted many CamelCase links into free links without registering it as an edit but the Starling logs are not affected by this.
^Placed in
WhichWikiShouldWeUse by CliffordAdams, in the context of summarizing/recapping earlier discussion on free links. This may or may not have been intentional on his part.
^UseModWiki would sometimes change a CamelCase title retroactively to the standard-capitalization title.
^Converting the links to [The] Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo to the new format
^
abEarlier edits were subsequently imported but did not affect the outcome.
^Created as a model for an alternative method of organization of AfghanistaN[a] on 21 January, it was blanked three days later and subsequently deleted by UseMod software.
^The subpages were disabled in the main namespace with Phase II software.
^Revisions with ID number 0 are reserved for the current revision of a page.
^Found from searching through
page ID numbers in the database table from around
19:00, 5 December 2005 per
this Signpost story to obtain the revision history for Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana
^Query 61587, which lists the lowest page IDs in the Wikipedia namespace. All other pages with page IDs below that one were originally in the main namespace, because the Wikipedia namespace did not exist until the Phase II software. The original title of the "User preferences help" page was Wikipedia:Help/User preferences. Also, its page history appears to be truncated, per the
first edit summary; compare the page with the next-highest page ID,
Wikipedia:PHP script new features, which has a recorded edit from
26 January 2002.
^This does not show up in
query 61008 because its page ID is 12917850.
^
abOriginally in filespace before being moved to Commons
^
abEarlier revisions are inaccessible within Wikipedia; the currently accessible version dates only to 2 November 2006.
^
abImages such as
game of life blinker.png were uploaded earlier to the English Wikipedia but were added independently to the Wikimedia Commons later.
^RecentChanges was intended to be a changelog to the wiki updated automatically. It is not related to the modern RecentChanges and
its history is archived.
^For the rest of 2001 and most of 2002, the Main Page mainly comprised
various categories and topics with the other items appearing as documented below.
^According to the Wayback Machine, the earliest confirmed entry in the "In the news" section is the
United States invasion of Afghanistan on 30 October 2001.
^The "Recent deaths" section dates only to 2012 in its modern form. In the early days, "In the news" and "Recent deaths" were in the same section with no distinction, although an attempt to separate them was made in 2002. In those same early days, the articles of both sections were simply linked on the Main Page without any blurbs.
^On 15 January 2011, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia, the "Today's featured article" blurb was replaced with a featured list,
Moons of Saturn, which was also a featured topic and featured sound.
^This occurred before {{
TOC limit|4}} reduced it to 129.
^Greek mythology was the only other article that had been continuously featured since 2001, until
it was demoted in March 2021.
^The creation is attributed to
Conversion script, but this masks an earlier revision that was not imported in the
Usemod article histories import; there is no relevant history at the Nostalgia Wikipedia. The date of 25 January 2002 was when Wikipedia began using
Phase II software
^The
consistent popularity of these articles is believed to be in part because people accidentally type these site names/URLs into a Wikipedia search box (either in the MediaWiki interface or a web browser) when intending to actually visit the sites themselves.
^This record was set in the period after
his death.
^Figure could be higher if the CamelCase version is included as well. Assuming that at least some of those editors misinterpreted the page to make edits better suited towards projectspace (questions, etc.) and therefore excluding it,
United States has been edited by 10,561 editors.
^Figure only includes editors in the past 50,000 revisions. Extrapolating that figure to the 717,123 total edits it has received in its current incarnation gives an estimate of about 170,000 editors.
^Page was changed from a redirect to a disambiguation page on 10 October 2010 and back into a redirect on 6 July 2024; both edits were made while the page was a disambiguation page.
^Early on it was decided that The weather in London be used as a placeholder red link, but it would later come to be regarded as a valid and encyclopedic topic, if only as a redirect. Nevertheless, its old use persisted amongst some Wikipedians, hence the deletion war, before the title was finally accepted for its current use.
^The current article is about a different Daniel Brandt than the individual in the
Essjay controversy.
^This is difficult to determine because the
Oracle's parsing starts to break down as you go back past 2005 where many log pages are erroneously parsed as being completely empty. Nonetheless, it is possible to search individual logpage contents for the string "{{", and approximate how many AfD transclusions there are. It is also possible to
sort the logpages by size.
Oldest page that was created in the Wikipedia namespace and not moved from mainspace: Wikipedia:User preferences help, first recorded edit 27 January 2002 but probably created the day before[ai]
These are current as of 7 July 2024. Those who are interested in updating them can use the special searches provided as refnotes to find more: simply change the archive number to one more than the numbers listed here. If you find anything, keep going up until you stop finding more, and then that's the new record. There are no pages with archives in the TimedText talk namespace.
Longest talk page thread: unknown
Views
The most viewed pages of Wikipedia before 2007 remain unknown, though the
multiyear ranking of most viewed pages gives views for top 100 pages since 2007.
Most visited article that is not about a website nor related specifically to the United States:
Elizabeth II, followed by
India and then
World War II
Single-day views
Typically, the most visited page on a single day is the
Main Page. From 21 July to 16 August 2016, the page averaged 58,900,479 views per day, far more views than any other page.
Longest time between site-wide edits not due to software issues or blackouts:[u] 68,424 seconds (19 hours and 24 seconds) between an edit to
UnitedStates by
office.bomis.com on 23:47:31, 15 January 2001 and another edit to UnitedStates by office.bomis.com on 18:47:55, 16 January 2001
The MediaWiki software limits the length of page titles to 255 bytes, thus some titles that would be longer than the ones in the list below are not included. For instance, the full title of When the Pawn... would be 445 bytes.
Longest-running VfD with participation:
WikidPad, from 12 January 2005 to
26 July 2020 (15 years, 196 days)
Longest-running AfD:
Disposal orbit, from 3 January 2006 to 8 July 2022 (16 years, 186 days)
Slowest speedy delete:
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Griphennus, nominated on 3 December 2005, deleted the next day, along with AfD page (which was deleted without being closed) on 4 December; undeleted to fix a redlink and closed "speedy delete" on 10 July 2024 (18 years, 220 days)
With a never-deleted AfD:
Brent's T.V., nominated on 2 January 2006 and closed "speedy delete" on 7 July 2022 (16 years, 186 days)
Statistics
First daily deletion logpage:
25 December 2004 (to which 22 debates were automatically transcluded on 29 December).
Most AfDs in a single AfD daily logpage: 251, on
19 December 2005 (the second highest number, 238, was on the
day before).
Fewest AfDs in a single AfD daily logpage:[cs] 0, on
22 February 2005, the "Stolen Day" in which server issues prevented the logpage from being filled.
Fewest AfDs in a single AfD daily logpage that wasn't due to server problems: 16, on
17 May 2014.
The following information is drawn from
User:JPxG/Oracle/All, and only cover AfD nominations after the August 2005 format switch (prior to which deletions were processed at
WP:VfD).
Most !votes in an AfD discussion: 301, on
Esoteric programming languages (March 2006), in a gargantuan 60-page batch nomination
Most !votes in a non-batched AfD: 293, on
Brian Chase (Wikipedia hoaxer) (December 2005). In total there were 146 keeps, 46 deletes, and 124 merges. While the discussion was closed as "keep", for some time afterwards the page oscillated between being an article and a redirect in an edit war whose distinguished participants included
Jimbo Wales. It is currently (as of 2021) a redirect.
Most "keep" !votes in an AfD: 146, on
the same AfD.
Most "keep" votes in a VfD: 226, on
Flying Spaghetti Monster (August 2005). In total there were 238 votes, including 9 "delete"s, 3 "merge"s, and 1 "moo".
Longest undetected patent nonsense page outside of projectspace:
Talk:Sombrero Galaxy/ ("the sobrereo galaxy fat ") from 22 January 2018 to 21 October 2023 (5 years, 272 days)
^The 21:16, 16 January 2001 revision was the first time the
edit summary was used on Wikipedia.
^Users with ID number 0 are reserved for IP addresses.
^UseModWiki had ID numbers of its own, but those appear to have been internally inconsistent and are disregarded by MediaWiki. The lowest ID number found in the Starling logs is 111, which is shared between several domain names that do not appear to have been related.
^Jack Lemmon was created on 16 June 2001 and updated on the day after his death.
^Dale Earnhardt was created on
22 February 2001. He had died three days earlier on 18 February. The January–August 2001 logs show that
Recent celebrity deaths was created on 14 March 2001, with Earnhardt being one of the first entries.
^Many victims of the
September 11 attacks had articles created on them in the aftermath. Most of them were later deleted and moved to the former
Sep11wiki, among the earliest being Tara Creamer on
12 September 2001, the day after her death. However, none of them had articles before the attacks.
^
abcPhase I software (UseModWiki) had no way to natively include images, so images had to be linked with their raw URLs from external sources. Phase II software had no upload history, so a new version of a file
wiped out the previous revision. The modern Upload Wizard arrived with Phase III software on 20 July 2002.
^Meta was launched on 9 November and tested Manske's Phase II script before it was adopted by the English Wikipedia on 25 January 2002. UseModWiki had no way to natively upload images, so at that time one had to upload an image to Meta and copy and paste the resultant URL into the desired Wikipedia page. The meta file now
shadows the Commons file, which dates to 24 March 2005.
^Featured articles were formerly known as brilliant prose.
^Placed in
SandBox by
PhillipHankins, it is unclear as to whether the test actually worked at the time, although subsequent discussion appears to imply that it did not; earlier discussion had used double-brackets, but in the context of demonstrating what free links were rather than trying to actually be links. This is the first edit that was an effort to actually produce a free link. About a minute later he would change the content to uppercase "Test" and then lowercase "denmark", making
Denmark the first content page to be the attempted target of a free link. UseModWiki would run a script later in 2001 that retroactively
converted many CamelCase links into free links without registering it as an edit but the Starling logs are not affected by this.
^Placed in
WhichWikiShouldWeUse by CliffordAdams, in the context of summarizing/recapping earlier discussion on free links. This may or may not have been intentional on his part.
^UseModWiki would sometimes change a CamelCase title retroactively to the standard-capitalization title.
^Converting the links to [The] Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo to the new format
^
abEarlier edits were subsequently imported but did not affect the outcome.
^Created as a model for an alternative method of organization of AfghanistaN[a] on 21 January, it was blanked three days later and subsequently deleted by UseMod software.
^The subpages were disabled in the main namespace with Phase II software.
^Revisions with ID number 0 are reserved for the current revision of a page.
^Found from searching through
page ID numbers in the database table from around
19:00, 5 December 2005 per
this Signpost story to obtain the revision history for Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana
^Query 61587, which lists the lowest page IDs in the Wikipedia namespace. All other pages with page IDs below that one were originally in the main namespace, because the Wikipedia namespace did not exist until the Phase II software. The original title of the "User preferences help" page was Wikipedia:Help/User preferences. Also, its page history appears to be truncated, per the
first edit summary; compare the page with the next-highest page ID,
Wikipedia:PHP script new features, which has a recorded edit from
26 January 2002.
^This does not show up in
query 61008 because its page ID is 12917850.
^
abOriginally in filespace before being moved to Commons
^
abEarlier revisions are inaccessible within Wikipedia; the currently accessible version dates only to 2 November 2006.
^
abImages such as
game of life blinker.png were uploaded earlier to the English Wikipedia but were added independently to the Wikimedia Commons later.
^RecentChanges was intended to be a changelog to the wiki updated automatically. It is not related to the modern RecentChanges and
its history is archived.
^For the rest of 2001 and most of 2002, the Main Page mainly comprised
various categories and topics with the other items appearing as documented below.
^According to the Wayback Machine, the earliest confirmed entry in the "In the news" section is the
United States invasion of Afghanistan on 30 October 2001.
^The "Recent deaths" section dates only to 2012 in its modern form. In the early days, "In the news" and "Recent deaths" were in the same section with no distinction, although an attempt to separate them was made in 2002. In those same early days, the articles of both sections were simply linked on the Main Page without any blurbs.
^On 15 January 2011, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia, the "Today's featured article" blurb was replaced with a featured list,
Moons of Saturn, which was also a featured topic and featured sound.
^This occurred before {{
TOC limit|4}} reduced it to 129.
^Greek mythology was the only other article that had been continuously featured since 2001, until
it was demoted in March 2021.
^The creation is attributed to
Conversion script, but this masks an earlier revision that was not imported in the
Usemod article histories import; there is no relevant history at the Nostalgia Wikipedia. The date of 25 January 2002 was when Wikipedia began using
Phase II software
^The
consistent popularity of these articles is believed to be in part because people accidentally type these site names/URLs into a Wikipedia search box (either in the MediaWiki interface or a web browser) when intending to actually visit the sites themselves.
^This record was set in the period after
his death.
^Figure could be higher if the CamelCase version is included as well. Assuming that at least some of those editors misinterpreted the page to make edits better suited towards projectspace (questions, etc.) and therefore excluding it,
United States has been edited by 10,561 editors.
^Figure only includes editors in the past 50,000 revisions. Extrapolating that figure to the 717,123 total edits it has received in its current incarnation gives an estimate of about 170,000 editors.
^Page was changed from a redirect to a disambiguation page on 10 October 2010 and back into a redirect on 6 July 2024; both edits were made while the page was a disambiguation page.
^Early on it was decided that The weather in London be used as a placeholder red link, but it would later come to be regarded as a valid and encyclopedic topic, if only as a redirect. Nevertheless, its old use persisted amongst some Wikipedians, hence the deletion war, before the title was finally accepted for its current use.
^The current article is about a different Daniel Brandt than the individual in the
Essjay controversy.
^This is difficult to determine because the
Oracle's parsing starts to break down as you go back past 2005 where many log pages are erroneously parsed as being completely empty. Nonetheless, it is possible to search individual logpage contents for the string "{{", and approximate how many AfD transclusions there are. It is also possible to
sort the logpages by size.