User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Reference Desk/@comment-5959773-20130106175347/@comment-188432-20130107225530

That's hard to say because there is a gap in the records, owing to an early code update which obscures our earliest records. Edits before February 2005 aren't well understood.

But you'll certainly find evidence of editing as early as 16 February 2005. Tardis:About and Main Page (as it was then known) were edited on that date. Castrovalva already existed by that date, but we don't know exactly when Castrovalva was started, because our first surviving record of that page is when it was moved to Castrovalva (TV story) on 16 March 2005. Clearly it had to exist to be moved.

One of the other things that suggests our age is the rather cool fact that we have a number of fairly mundane administrative edits by Angela. She's the co-founder of WikiCities/Wikia along with Jimbo Wales, and the fact that she took such a direct interest in the minutiae of our setup, and even just vandalism-fighting, suggests just how early in the life of WikiCities our wiki was. I mean, she's got edits on Tardis:About, which is just crazy. You'd never see a modern Wikia Staff member with that kind of direct intervention on an About page.

By the way, if you wondering how we can assert the 11 November 2004 date as our start date when we don't have records from before February 2005, it's because it was directly supplied by Wikia. Although our current logs don't have this data, Wikia have kept records of the older log system, and it is the one which gives, correctly, Mantrid as the founder and November 2004 as the start date.

The earliest months of our wiki are a fascinating time to explore, mainly because there are so many dead end trails. It looks like Mantrid is in no way the founder, because he's welcomed to the wiki in July 2005, and there's a record of Freethinker1of1 granting Mantrid bureaucrat status in October of 2005. But in fact none of that was necessary, or even makes much sense. We have clear records that Mantrid was actively contributing from early March 2005, so the welcome in July makes no sense. And since Wikia have definitely confirmed that he was the founder, he wouldn't have needed the bureaucrat status placed on him, but it was still possible to grant it. Tangerineduel couldn't re-grant me bureaucrat status these days — once it's done, it's done — but, according to the Wikia dev notes, there was a point where it was possible.

I wish I had been here just a little bit earlier to keep local records of the wiki in that infant state, but, alas, I can only be a bit of an archaeologist.