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I was looking through some old files in our SourceForge project. I opened a file called wiki.tar.gz, and inside were three complete backups of the text of
Knowledge, from February, March and August 2001! / This is exciting, because there is lots of article history in here which was assumed to be lost
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of the edit and by itself confers the owner no special rights. However, plans were made to set up a website, "Edit This NFT", mirroring only the original page; the purchaser would be allowed to edit it. It sold for US$ 750,000. Numerous
Knowledge editors objected to the sale on various grounds. Some
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For the record, these are the earliest edits that have been found, but not the earliest edits. In the early days of Usemod wiki, I did a lot of deleting things *on the hard drive* (as this was the only way to really do that). Those will never be found of course. The first words, soon deleted, were
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software; in 2010, previously inaccessible records of early UseModWiki revisions were found in archives by
Wikimedia developer Tim Starling. When these edits were imported into Knowledge's database at 02:28, July 30, 2019 (UTC), its earliest recorded edit became the January 15, 2001, creation of
173:(NFT) of a re-creation of what he claimed to be the first Knowledge edit, made earlier than the "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit. Wales' edit, whose timestamp was listed as 18:29 UTC on January 15, 2001, was on the page
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It consisted of the text "Hello, World!"; it was made as a test and subsequently erased. Previously, other tokens referencing " of internet history" had been turned into "wildly expensive NFTs" – in June 2021,
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announced that he would sell a website containing a re-creation of an earlier edit that he said he made and then later deleted, which contained the text "Hello, World!", to the highest bidder as a
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process. A message sent by Sanger to the
Nupedia mailing list said "Humor me go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes". On January 13, 2001, Knowledge's
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with the text "This is the new WikiPedia!" by an anonymous person using the office.bomis.com server. On being informed of the importation of these edits, Wales said:
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principles. They were broadly not opposed to Wales selling the iMac he used at the time, but objected to the NFT for representing what they perceived as
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page to advertise the sale was a violation of
Knowledge guidelines against self-promotion. Other editors criticized the sale on the grounds that the
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Knowledge began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
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Historically, the earliest surviving edit on
Knowledge's database was a January 16, 2001, revision of the page
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conceived of
Knowledge as a source of volunteer entries from the general public that could then be "fed into"
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That edit… was originally penned… shortly after the site first rolled out to the public in mid-January, 2001.
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The product being sold was not actual ownership of the edit (as
Knowledge content is released under a
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On
December 3, 2021, Wales announced that he would be selling, through auction house
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license), but rather a "digital item" that records the purchaser's name alongside a
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proposed a "Free
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Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice
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that was formerly the earliest-surviving edit in the Knowledge database
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editors, including administrators, argued that Wales' use of his own
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was registered, and on January 15, 2001, Knowledge was launched.
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810:"Jimmy Wales Is Auctioning the "Birth of Knowledge" as an NFT"
651:"Jimmy Wales Is Auctioning His First Knowledge Edit As an NFT"
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Figure 3.2 The earliest still-extant Knowledge editing entry.
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692:"Jimmy Wales is selling his first Knowledge edit as an NFT"
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A re-creation of the "Hello, World!" edit, as auctioned by
367:"The First Edit to Knowledge Is Being Auctioned as an NFT"
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Bluerasberry; Pythoncoder; Smallbones (August 30, 2019).
466:"[Foundation-l] Old Knowledge Backups Discovered"
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581:"Christie's auctioning off NFT of first Knowledge edit"
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The Iraq War: A Historiography of Knowledge Changelogs
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of NFTs is incompatible with Knowledge's open-source
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562:"Knowledge Is Selling a Slice of Internet History"
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19:For Knowledge's internal page on this topic, see
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624:"Knowledge: HomePage: re-creation of early edit"
522:"Import log entry by User:Graham87 for HomePage"
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330:"Knowledge–The Utopia that Survived and Thrived"
433:. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 89–90.
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79:encyclopedia was first posited in the 1990s;
16:First Knowledge edit on its homepage in 2001
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107:"UuU" redirects here. For other uses, see
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185:auctioned off a token referencing an
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1393:Carlos Bandeirense MirandĂłpolis hoax
1363:on the Arabic and Persian Wikipedias
729:Bonifacic, Igor (December 3, 2021).
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400:"The Oldest Surviving Web Pages"
1418:Seigenthaler biography incident
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885:Conflict-of-interest editing
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201:for some features of the
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751:"The Birth of Knowledge"
1424:Star Trek Into Darkness
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161:Non-fungible token sale
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1388:Alan MacMasters hoax
1094:WikiConference India
927:Deletion of articles
306:on December 23, 2006
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