| “ | Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there are 14 not-bad articles so far [out of an estimated 184 total], and that's great. | ” |
| — Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announcing the BrilliantProse page introduction in inaugurating the Wikipedia-l mailing list, 22 January 2001[1] | ||
The "modern" (so to speak) process of Featured Article candidacy was created on 24 June 2003 by User:Eloquence. Prior to that time Wikipedia had a system known as Brilliant Prose to recognize its best content, which was an ad hoc collection of articles added to the Brilliant prose page by various editors.
Due to the UseModWiki software in place during 2001 and early 2002, a large number of edits from that era do not survive to the modern day in the main Wikipedia edit history database. However, Tim Starling discovered a backup database that contained all the edits that had been thereto lost to history. In the case where the relevant diffs do not survive, and when the 10K redux doesn't maintain a record (i.e., anything after 8 March 2001), users have manually reconstructed the versions using Starling's archives and created a subpage for the version, crediting the original author(s) in the subpage-creation edit summary. Many of the earlier pages have odd capitalization due to software considerations of the time. The capitalization of the initial letters of each page are as they appear in the relevant entry of the logs verbatim, due to software both then and now it is irrelevant; this case insensitivity does not apply to other letters in a page's title.
Starting in November 2001 these additions are readily available in the [merged] page history of Wikipedia:Featured articles. This page commemorates the earlier process and contains history up to 17 August 2001. There are some missing edits from August to November 2001 which have as yet not been found.[2]