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History of Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
7 points by bookofjoe on Dec 11, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



I was co-maintainer of PhpWiki those times. Jimbo contacted us in 2001 with this crazy idea, if he could use our software. We were all pretty active around Ward's wiki and the UseModWiki meta site, with thousands of articles, and established standards. But Jimbo was a newbie and demanded totally crazy things from us, which we denied. Like representing a space in a title as _. You cannot just break the 1:1 relationship of titles to 1:n. Every legal page can only start with an uppercase char. Totally silly ideas. But we still liked the crazy idea of these folks. eg one of their first pages was PoliTics, explaining that this consists of two words, the first meaning Many and the seconds Blood Sucking Insects.

Eventually they took our diff implementation written by Jeff Dairiki, but unfortunately not our much better page, template and plugin solutions, which was extremely safe to use and to extend, not as horrible as their adhoc written MediaWiki SW. This was more like the Sourceforge SW. Well, another example of Worse is better.




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