This year, Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

The free online encyclopedia has become one of those essential Internet sites.  It’s a query suffix for me.  Want to know something about Mozart, pumpkins, or Euler’s Homogeneous Function Theorem?  Google “mozart wikipedia” for a definitive, trustworthy answer.  It’s also delightful to browse.  I can’t count how many hours I’ve spent lying in bed, starting on one topic and deep-diving through a forest of links.

I wondered the other day what the first pages on Wikipedia were.  If you’re going to write a comprehensive encyclopedia on human knowledge, where do you go first?  Science?  History?  Tech?  Today, there’s articles on virtually every facet of human existence – over 7.1 million – but how did it all start?

There’s a Wikipedia page for that.

Here’s the first ten, in order:

1. The home page
2. Wikipedia itself
3. Philosophy and Logic
4. The United States
5. Popular Music
6. Sports
7. Mathematics and Science
8. Countries of the World
9. AAA
10. Afghanistan

A rather eclectic diversity!  Two countries – and why those two?  A couple of those are index-type pages.

Interesting to note that Wikipedia started on a different software, which required CamelCase to make a link.  So for example, the “Afghanistan” page was actually “AfghanistaN”.  MediaWiki, the software that now powers Wikipedia, was first released a year after Wikipedia started.

The other 90 of the first 100 are also a mix of big, top-level topics and strangely specific ones.  So there’s History, Technology, Computing, and other countries, and also a lot of policy/howto pages such as “Link to an Existing Page,” “How Does One Edit a Page,” and “Be Bold in Editing Pages”.  But there’s also very specific pages, such as the Donegal Fiddle Tradition, Rhode Island, and William Alston.  I’m assuming people were turned loose to work on their pet interests – much as Wikipedia evolved to what it is today.

Scott Moonen has the distinction of being the first named human on Wikipedia, though it’s a user page.  The first human who has an actual Wikipedia page is Thomas Reid, a Scottish philosopher.  He died in 1796, and could never have imagined this obscure honor.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.