Wikipedia:Main Page history

The Main Page, known as HomePage from 15 January 2001 to 25 January 2002, has been the dominant page on Wikipedia since its inception. The first page to be created, on any given day it is by far the most viewed page on the website, with more than 23 million daily views as of 2016.

Viewing the history of the English Wikipedia's Main Page is not straightforward. Although originally written directly in wikitext, since the late 2000s almost all of the text is transcluded from various templates, which are cascade protected; the main exception to this is the welcome banner and portal list at the top of the page. The Main Page sections that are regularly updated are "Today's featured article", "In the news", "Did you know", "On this day", "Today's featured list" and the picture of the day. In addition, the templates for other areas of Wikipedia, Wikipedia's sister projects, Wikipedia languages and Main Page interwikis may also be occasionally modified; the page also contains a Main Page banner template that is used very rarely to display special messages.

Design and layout history
The Wikipedia HomePage was initially at www.wikipedia.com. This became www.wikipedia.org in June 2003 with the founding of the Wikimedia Foundation and then on 10 January 2005 this URL stopped redirecting to the English Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org and became a project portal for the many Wikipedias in various languages.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has extensively saved the Main Page, normally with numerous snapshots for each day. The earliest capture of HomePage, while the Main Page at its current URL has been. See also from the Version Museum on the design evolution on Wikipedia.

2001–2002
HomePage was the first page created on Wikipedia, with an edit from Bomis's servers that said in its entirety "This is the new WikiPedia!" That sentence would remain the opening line until February 2001, when it was replaced with the "Welcome to Wikipedia!" that has (capitalization permitting) graced the main page ever since. Later on 15 January 2001 articles related to broad topics such as "zoology" or "philosophy" were added to it, and they would remain the bulk of the main page's content during 2001 and most of 2002.

To see the Main Page as it was in 2001, see Nostalgia Wikipedia.

The September 11 attacks was the first current event to be added to the main page. This trend would continue for the rest of 2001, embracing such events as the United States invasion of Afghanistan and the 2001 Anthrax attacks. Recent deaths have been included on the main page in some form or another since at least that of Dudley Moore on 27 March 2002. Throughout various designs and redesigns the recent deaths would alternate between being included with the news items or separated from them; the modern recent deaths section dates from 2012. In the early days the articles related to news items and recent deaths were simply added to the main page without any blurb.

The date was also included on the main page in this era; initially updated daily by hand, this was done with magic words after the conversion to Phase II software.

As of early 2002 the main page was divided into four sections, from top to bottom (the names for "Vital topics" and "Meta" are an invention of this page):
 * Current events and breaking news: this would contain the current events and recent deaths; at times each individual relevant article would be linked, or just Current events (now Portal:Current events) on its own.
 * Vital topics: This was split into four headers (Philosophy, Mathematics, and Natural Science; Social Sciences; Applied Arts and Sciences; and Culture) that each contained about 10–20 broad articles (in the spirit of the modern-day vital articles, but probably not ancestral to them) on the given topic.
 * Meta: This contained a header for "Other Category Schemes", with about 10 other forms of categorizing encyclopedic content (Dewey Decimal, historical timeline, etc.), and one for "Wikipedias in other languages" for what would now be considered sister projects.
 * Wikipedia: This contained six headers (About the project, Article pointers, Content requests, Useful resources for us, Selected press coverage, and Links) that related to the English Wikipedia specifically and each contained links to about 5 to 10 pages. The "Article pointers" header pointed to "Brilliant prose", an early version of Featured articles.

The specifics of this design, as well as the contents, tended to fluctuate throughout the era. Selected anniversaries were added to the main page on 11 October 2002, although at that time it was simply a link to Selected anniversaries and did not display any specific anniversaries on the main page itself.

2003 redesign
The main page was first overhauled in 2003.

2004: adding featured content
What had been called "Brilliant prose" was renamed "Featured articles" in 2003, a name that was considered less pretentious. The main page was redesigned to include a featured article for a given day in a prominent position starting in February 2004, an arrangement that persists to this day. The Did You Know section for newly-added content also dates to February 2004, with the Picture of the Day dating to May 2004.

2006–present: modern design


The modern design for Wikipedia's Main Page was largely completed in 2006. A community effort that began in December 2004 to redesign the Main Page and key pages linked from it, was implemented in March 2006 after several months of discussion and input from the community organized by the Usability WikiProject. No significant redesign proposal has been successful since then, although minor changes have been made. TAFI was added to the main page in 2013 but was removed shortly thereafter.

Admin tools
HomePage was first protected sometime between October and November 2001, but this protection was apparently lost upon the conversion to Phase II software. Its earliest entry in the modern protection log is on 19 February 2006; it was move-protected on 1 April 2006 and cascade-protected on 14 January 2007. There is normally little reason for administrators to edit the Main Page directly.

It is common sense that deleting the main page would be a fairly bad idea, to the point where it has been impossible in MediaWiki since 2008. Nevertheless, deletions did occur in the 2000s, with those involved incurring much shame as a result. The main page has since been the subject of several facetious AfDs during April Fool's Day, though not any PRODs or CSDs as it is cascade protected:
 * Articles for Deletion/Main Page
 * Articles for Deletion/Main Page (2nd nomination)
 * Articles for deletion/Main Page (3rd nomination)
 * Articles for deletion/Main Page (4th nomination) is creation protected.

Revision history
The only shows changes in how the Main Page includes several sections, not changes in the sections themselves. The histories of each section are stored separately in their corresponding templates (see the edit histories for "", "",, , and ). Histories for other sections ("Today's featured article", "On this day", "Today's featured list" and the picture of the day), on the other hand, are stored in separate templates for each date.

The 34 oldest edits of (dated 09:43, 22 November 2001 to 09:45, 20 December 2001) are part of a revision history that is continued, via one or more old cut-and-paste moves, by the current oldest edit of Main Page (dated 15:28, 26 January 2002). In the gap between these times, 37 days of edits may be irretrievably missing.

Snapshots of the Main Page
Copies of the Main Page since 16 December 2010 can be seen at Main Page history/, etc.; see also. Some dates may have two snapshots (the second suffixed with "b"), mainly to handle times when "Did you know" was updated twice a day (although not all such occurrences are recorded here). A few snapshots are missing, indicated by red links below. Please note that the snapshots below may not represent the final or otherwise most accurate versions of the Main Page at the time, as sections are regularly updated in response to error reports, new events in the news, or for other miscellaneous reasons.

Articles appearing on the Main Page
To find articles (the boldface links) that appeared in a particular section of the Main Page on a certain day, use the following archives:
 * "Today's featured article"
 * "In the news" (not organized by day and up to June 2011 only; check for subsequent appearances and a full record)
 * "Did you know" (generally organized by the date and time taken off the Main Page; check for a full record or see the first timestamp below a certain hook for when it actually appeared)
 * "On this day" (templates for each date are reused every year; check their individual revision histories for a record of appearances)
 * "Today's featured list"
 * Picture of the day

Alternative versions of the Main Page
The following four pages can be used to view versions of the Main Page for the last and next two days, but with a few caveats:
 * Content for future pages is naturally subject to change before and during its appearance on the Main Page.
 * "In the news" is displayed as it appears on the current Main Page, as content is not specific to each day and Wikipedia cannot predict the future.
 * For yesterday's page, "Did you know" is displayed as it appears on the current Main Page, while upcoming queues are displayed in versions for future pages. Note that this is likely to be inaccurate if multiple sets are run in a day.
 * Pictures of the day are transcluded from their "protected versions". As this is only created 26 hours before the scheduled appearance, the day-after-tomorrow's page only displays the correct featured picture for two hours of the day; the previous day's (tomorrow's) is displayed at other times.


 * 1) Main Page/Day before yesterday (featured article, "Did you know", "On this day", featured list and picture of the day)
 * 2) Main Page/Yesterday (featured article, "On this day", featured list and picture of the day)
 * 3) Main Page/Tomorrow (featured article, "Did you know", "On this day", featured list and picture of the day)
 * 4) Main Page/Day after tomorrow (featured article, "Did you know", "On this day", featured list and picture of the day)

In addition, a week's worth of upcoming sections (except for "Did you know") can be found at Main Page queue, with the same proviso that all content there is subject to change.