Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Wikipedia's oldest articles (section)

==Explanation==
Wikipedia originally used [[UseModWiki]] (also known as Phase I software), which did not keep page history reliably, and often deleted it after a couple of weeks. It originally used [[Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia|CamelCase]] for making links, rather than the [[Wikipedia:Free links|"free links" surrounded by brackets]] that are used today. Many pages were moved by cut and paste from CamelCase to regular titles, and some very early edits survive at these CamelCase titles; an example is [[Special:diff/279635|this edit to SabBath]] by [[Larry Sanger]]. Some users have contributions under a CamelCase version of their username, such as [[Special:Contributions/JimboWales|JimboWales]].

No history was imported from the UseModWiki era of Wikipedia when it migrated to the [[Wikipedia:Phase II software|Phase II software]], the predecessor to MediaWiki. [[User:Brooke Vibber|Brooke Vibber]] later imported all existing edits from UseModWiki to the current Wikipedia database (see [[Wikipedia:Usemod article histories]]). There is a copy of the Wikipedia database, with history up to 20 December 2001 [[UTC]], at the [[Nost:|Nostalgia Wikipedia]], which contains several edits that cannot be found in the current Wikipedia database. In December 2009, it [[Bugzilla:20280|became possible]] to import revisions from the Nostalgia Wikipedia directly to the English Wikipedia.