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, 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 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
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
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
22nd
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FuzzyCatPotato creates our Discord server. We already had TheMyon’s, but this one’s official (and nobody used or knew about the old one).
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October 2017
December 2017
January 2018
September 2018
October 2018
November 2018
December 2018
May 2019
August 2019
November 2019
May 2020
29th
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After over 12 years on RationalWiki, Conservopedia sysop User:Newton is indefinitely banned from RationalWiki by coop vote. The user has since created many sockpuppets up to the present to evade this ban.
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August 2020
December 2020
January 2021
December 2022
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.
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January 2023
See also