A brief history of RationalWiki
Once upon a time, as many such stories begin, began the history of RationalWiki. Then ye shall see the story upon this tapestry woven for your enjoyment.
1.0
RationalWiki 1.0, or RW 1.0, was founded by ColinR in March 2007 (as a result of this comment?) in a disgusted reaction to the foolishness evidenced at Conservapedia (CP). Over the next couple of months, editors at CP who were suspected of "sanity" were carefully invited via email to come join the site.
It was a combination of people writing articles on topics they were frustrated by CP over, and a lot of random letting off of steam over the stupidity we were encountering over there. Articles and talk pages intermingled, and there were no rules.
Many users used it as a forum to discuss ways of improving the scientific content at Conservapedia.
The last 48 hours or so of RW 1.0 were a vandalism festival and one of only two recorded cases of RW ever reaching HCM 0, with people randomly wrecking articles, user pages, and, especially, the main page, prior to the Big Wipe.
2.0
The original RationalWiki logo
On May 16 and 17, 2007, now known as the Night of the Blunt Knives, every CP editor who was identifiable as a contributor to RationalWiki was perma-banned. Colin and Trent decided to wipe the wiki, mess that it was, and on May 22 started "RationalWiki 2.0", which you see before you now.
Most of us saved off-site copies of our user pages, and our pet articles.
RW 2.0 got up and running quite rapidly, although for a few days most of what we created were userboxes. A glamorous and sophisticated main page was built, and "community standards" were worked out by the mob. Shortly thereafter we wrote our mission statement, which now graces the aforementioned glamorous main page.
2.1
RationalWiki in its physical form prior to November 14, 2010.
Technically it became RationalWiki 2.1 on Sep. 10 2007, when our "host" Siteground blocked our access claiming we were using "too much shared server time". Apparently their business model is to attack any successful sites they host and blackmail them for $90/month (fifteen times the prepaid rate) for so-called "Virtual Private Server" service. We aren't that dumb, so within 24 hours Trent had moved the site to a new host.
RationalWiki 2.1 saw the introduction over its time of many innovative extensions:
- Up/down voting, which can be used at will anywhere
- Slider bar voting, likewise, can be used anywhere
- The complete set of WIGO pages that anyone could want
- The
barely alive now defunct "Article of the Weak" feature, with lots of interactive features
"Capturebot", used on the "WIGO CP" page to grab screenshots of links before they are memory-holed Broken as of some time in 2015 or so
Things also devolved in the egalitarian management of user rights even further:
- The tendency to make a sysop of any user deemed "mostly harmless" over 36 hours (or less) of editing
2.2
On January 6-7 2009, roughly from 6 PM to about 1 AM (EST), Conservapedia lost their spellchecker while RationalWiki was moved to a shiny, happy new server, next to Trent's pot plant.
2.2.1
The current RationalWiki logo
We upgraded our mashed potatoes in the afternoon of April 24, 2009 (EST) to the (then) latest version of MediaWiki. Thanks to Nx's prepreparationism, our "special" extensions survived - and improved. Viva la evolucion!
From August 19 to September 6 2009, RationalWiki went to the seaside.
We replaced our old copyleft licensed logo in November 2009 with a copyrighted one in order to gain more control over our brand.
3.0
The server farm as of late 2012.
RationalWiki took steps in 2010 to move beyond the ad hoc nature of its previous existence. In the summer of 2010, The RationalWiki Foundation Inc. (now the RationalMedia Foundation) was incorporated as a non-profit to manage the affairs of the wiki and any other projects. Ownership of the logo, domain name(s), and server hardware was transferred from the founder to the Foundation.
An election to add three Trustees to the two appointed to bootstrap the Foundation took place over December 2010 and January 2011.
RationalWiki moved from its home in Trent's home to commercial hosting on November 14 2010. The move also included an upgrade to the most recent version of the MediaWiki software, changing the default skin from Monobook to Vector.
After the server had died under load a few times, in October 2012 we put together a slightly more elaborate server farm. This serves the various RWF sites with marvellous speed and beauty and hardly dies nearly as often, maybe.
A much longer history of RationalWiki
The following is a timeline of major events in the history of RationalWiki.
March 2007
April 2007
The history of RationalWiki is shrouded in mystery at this point.
May 2007
First new account! W00t!
June 2007
July 2007
February 2008
| 5th
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ColinR, one of RationalWiki's two cofounders, makes his last edit ever and disappears. No one ever finds out why but speculation continues to this day. Ten years later, however, ColinR briefly reappeared in June 2018.
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January 2009
April 2009
August 2009
September 2009
January 2010
February 2010
May 2010
June 2010
| 8th
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The Loya Jirga codifies RW's "obviously vile comments can be deleted by anyone" rule. This is the only thing it ever decides on.
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July 2010
August 2010
November 2010
January 2011
April 2011
May 2011
| 15th
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On the fourth anniversary of the Night of the Blunt Knives Armondikov decrats everyone.
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Behind the scenes Nx desysops everyone.
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Discussions regarding the Crat elections 2011 begin.
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| 17th
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Trent utilizes his server access official and moral authority to announce propose a new system of user rights. The new system will abolish the Bureaucrat user group and establish the current system of sysops, mods and techs. Most of the mob supports him. It's RW's biggest outbreak of Headless chicken mode, rated HCM 0 (Mutually Assured Destruction) on the HCM scale. Several majors users leave and never come back, and the surviving editors speak of it only in hushed voices. (Except here on the Timeline. And whenever anyone bothers to remember ancient history like this.)
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July 2011
August 2011
September 2011
January 2012
March 2012
July 2012
August 2012
January 2013
July 2013
January 2014
| 14th
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- David Gerard updates RW's MediaWiki to version 1.19.10, breaking a number of things, such as MediaWiki "gadgets" and custom signature substitution. Much complaining ensues while the problems persist in the following days weeks months. A few people still have their signature templates substituted only on the next edit when the problem is fixed.
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March 2014
April 2014
November 2014
| 14th
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Mikemikev (Michael Coombs) is permabanned from RationalWiki. He would create sock accounts impersonating other people ever since.
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January 2015
February 2015
| 6th
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Ikanreed opened Forum:Rethinking "Snarky point of view", which asks whether RW should keep its snarky POV. The community overwhelmingly says, "yeah, sure".
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| 12th
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Polls open for the Board of trustees election [1], 5 positions are open for election. The 6 candidates are; David Gerard, Stabby the Misanthrope, Scream!!, Tielec01, Human, and ListenerX.
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| 13th
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After the work of many, FuzzyCatPotato reports that Category:Living people contained all living persons in subcategories of Category:People.
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| 27th
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Nutty Roux takes to the intercom to announce that David Gerard, Human, ListenerX, Stabby the Misanthrope, and Scream!! have been elected to the RMF board of trustees. Tielec01 was not elected.
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August 2015
September 2015
November 2015
| 2nd
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Moderator nominations open; first nominations are made.
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| 16th
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Nominations close; there are 26 candidates running. Only three of the seven incumbent moderators still want the job.
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The elections are scheduled to start. Oops.
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| 17th
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The elections actually start.
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| 23rd
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David Gerard falls out of bed and decides to extend the voting window for five hours, as he was not awake to close the polls at the time originally set for their closing.
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| 24th
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Technical difficulty with vote-counting occurs. We swear the chads were hung, really!
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| 25th
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After consulting with RationalWiki's top minds in the field of decoding number vomit, AgingHippie posts tentative results; nobody smells bull. David Gerard, Paravant, FuzzyCatPotato, and Gooniepunk are the winning moderators.
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January 2016
June 2016
November 2016
| 7th
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The RMF board unanimously voted to enact an amendment to stagger the board into two groups, each elected once per year, in hopes of ensuring continuity between boards. Community response was... mixed.
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January 2017
May 2017
June 2017
July 2017
August 2017
September 2017
October 2017
December 2017
January 2018
September 2018
October 2018
November 2018
December 2018
May 2019
| 12th
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Conservapedia user DMorris, aka "What a Wonderful World" on RW, is finally permabanned from the latter after all these years. He has since created countless "cheerleader" socks to try and evade this ban.
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August 2019
November 2019
May 2020
| 29th
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After over 12 years on RationalWiki, Conservapedia sysop Newton (aka Ken) is indefinitely banned from the former by coop vote. The user has since spent years trying to evade this ban by creating a sock army that gives even Michael Coombs a run for his money.
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August 2020
September 2020
December 2020
January 2021
March 2021
| 23rd
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CorruptUser founds a centralized page for voting on article rating changes, making brainstars less special more meaningful and dynamic and adding new incentive for large mainspace contributions. User:CircularReasoning helps out with some of the redirects and templating a bit.
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August 2021
| 3rd
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After being a presence on the Wiki for nearly 7 years, Oxyaena is permabanned by her own choosing. This is, so far, the only known case of an editor requesting an ATIM vote to have themselves permanently removed from the Wiki.
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December 2021
| 19th
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After contributing to the Wiki for over 8 years, Smerdis of Tlön passes away.
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August 2022
December 2022
| 9th
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The "Political insanity" category is voted for deletion, marking a final end to the old RationalWiki practice of marking pages with political snarl word categories. Most of its subcategories had the word moonbat or wingnut in the name, and had been deleted in March and May 2022, after the community grew tired of edit wars over overly subjective, non-informative categorizations. They had long since ceased to be funny. (A final straggler among former subcategories was purged in February 2023.)
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| 20th
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The results of the 2022 moderator elections were announced. Due to technical problems, the original ballots were lost and voting was re-opened for 1 week. Notably, every incumbent besides Techpriest (who chose not to run) won reelection.
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November 2023
| 7th
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Conservapedia:What is going on at CP? is finally marked as a deprecated WIGO (What Is Going On) page, following a brief talk page discussion. It had become a very rarely edited page, interest having waned (not to mention Conservapedia itself being in a death spiral). However, it is not locked; updates are only discouraged. This WIGO page was originally the center of RationalWiki's collaborative on-wiki news microblogging, focus branching out in July 2008 and shifting over the years.
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December 2023
| 3rd
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The results of the 2023 moderator elections are announced.
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| 11th
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After several years of paying out of his pocket for RationalWiki, Tmtoulouse goes missing, and Linode tells David Gerard that RW only has one week to pay the server bills.
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| 13th
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Enter Stabby the Misanthrope, past and present treasurer, who sets up an emergency fundraiser to save the site. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, knowing that we'd dodged a bullet. RW hits the funding goal in under 24 hours, the quickest of any fundraiser in site history. Trent luckily came through after this anyway, but not before the absence jolted some needed changes into place (like the board of trustees finally — touch wood — regaining its ability to hold a meeting).
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January 2024
| 1st
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Stabby closes the emergency fundraiser. A total of $7450.21 was raised, making it the most successful fundraiser in RationalWiki’s history.
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See also
to discuss the state of the wiki.
RationalWiki turns 10. 