How long have you been a Wikipedian? Answers to this question vary, of course, but any user who has been here longer than a few months can probably remember an important change within the Wikipedia community.

• Before February 2001, Wikipedia had no knowledge of the [[double bracket]] form of internal linking. Instead, the first Wikipedians used CamelCase, even in article titles. This was awkward, especially for the uninitiated who didn't have a very good understanding of wikis.
• A new addition to the sidebar occurred in February 2004, when the Wikipedia:Community Portal was invented.
• In 2004, the "Classic" Wikipedia skin was dumped as the default, in favor of the "MonoBook" skin. One user is believed to temporarily quit the project due to this change.
• In mid-2004, the MediaWiki namespace was deprecated as the namespace used to generate "boilerplate" texts, such as stub messages; the template namespace is now used instead. {{msg:stub}} became {{stub}}.
• Just recently, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion became Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.
• The Special:Randompage feature is now simply Special:Random.
• The MediaWiki software has been updated several times. One interesting change is the ability of article titles to contain special characters. This was available on non-English versions for a while.
• Wikipedia:Quickpolls came and went.
• Wikipedia:Requests for adminship and Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion underwent various policy changes.
• The Willy on Wheels made many users take a different look at vandalism.
• The Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost were established, and have functioned for many months.
• The Main Page has been renovated numerous times; its content is now almost entirely stored in templates.
• Finally, Wikipedia's presence on the Internet and elsewhere has exploded. Two well-known magazines, Wired and Esquire, have already featured large stories on the project.

The Wikipedia of 2005 is very much nearly unrecognizable with its 2001 counterpart. It can probably be assumed that another four years will bring even more changes, both inside and outside of the project. Nevertheless, we can only hope that Wikipedians do not lose sight of its original purpose.

—Merovingian (t) (c) (e) 03:25, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The author encourages editing and expansion of this essay.

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