Here are the folks who appear to be the top 20 contributors to Wikipedia’s first 10,000 edits. (‘Josh Grosse’ was combined with ‘JoshuaGrosse’, as well as ‘Larry_Sanger’ with ‘LarrySanger’. The Internet addresses could also be one of the named people.)

      1724   TimShell
      1099   LarrySanger
      1035   JoshuaGrosse
       562   JimboWales
       434   WojPob
       387   dhcp058.246.lvcm.com
       359   Dick Beldin
       338   RoseParks
       332   cobrand.bomis.com
       293   fw-us-hou-8.bmc.com
       218   AyeSpy
       189   office.bomis.com
       156   Andy Jewell
       140   Gareth Owen
       138   LinusTolke
       125   BryceHarrington
       107   SoniC
       106   Malcolm Farmer
       101   OprgaG
        82   dt010n5e.san.rr.com

Ported/Archived Responses

Steven Walling on 2010-12-20

Interesting. Compared to the earliest list of names from the WikiPedians page (culled from people who had signed their edits recently) lists:

> * [[Josh Grosse]]
> * [[Phil Bordelon]]
> * [[Larry Sanger]], cofounder of [[wikipedia]] and editor-in-chief of [[nupedia]]
> * [[Malcolm Farmer]]
> * RoseParks
> * SoniC
> * [[Mathijs]]
> * [[Lee Daniel Crocker]]
> * [[Jimbo Wales]], the other cofounder of this great project
> * WojPob
> * CliffordAdams
> * [[Bomfog]]
> * [[Jmlynch]]
> * TimShell, to whom we owe the 13% of wikipedia devoted to [[Atlas Shrugged]]
> * [[Cdani]]
> * AstroNomer
> * [[Suzanne Elsasser]]
> * [[Pguiral]]
> * [[Dick Beldin]], to whom we owe most of the [[Statistics]] pages
> * [[Invictus]]
> * [[John Abbe]]

I’m trying to figure out if any of these early volunteers (so not Jimmy, Larry, or Bomis employees) are still around and editing.

llywrch on 2010-12-21

A few notes on this list of early contributors:
* Tim Shell was Wales’ partner at Bomis. Some of the anonymous edits from the bomis.com domain are likely his.
* John Abbe – I know John, but didn’t know he had been associated with Wikipedia at such an early date. I saw him at the 2006 Wikimania in Boston, & remember him telling me later that he had twice failed to become an Admin because people didn’t think he had enough experience.
* As for the other mysterious usernames, we may never know who they were. Apparently the habit of joining Wikipeida to make a few edits – or in some cases, a few hundred – then vanishing is not a new development.

Geoff