You see a conspicuous lack of nitty-gritty.
> Add facts
> "Our fork is of content from early June 2012.
> Pages were collected between July 2 and July 9, 2012."
> Done
> Create article using facts
ERROR. Human intervention required for article creation.
> Print timeline
Microsoft Printer Setup returned with exit code -237.
> Say timeline
"timeline"
> Dammit why don't you work
You don't know what words mean, do you.
> List Timeline
The wiki that was to become TV Tropes got its first edit.
July 2004
Looney Toons reads a blog entry about TV Tropes and decides it might be a fun way to spend a slow afternoon.
October 26, 2010
The Google Incident, aka The Situation. Google suddenly and without notice shuts off all advertising to TV Tropes, in response to a determination that TVT was not compliant with their AdSense guidelines. TVT responds by implementing various low-impact methods such as requiring registration to see "non-compliant" pages (without ads).
April 2012
The Second Google Incident. Responding to another threat to TVT's advertising revenue due to Google being informed of "inappropriate" content, Fast Eddied responds with a previously-unseen alacrity. Hundreds of pages addressing topics suitable to persons over the age of ten are culled and a censorship regime is imposed on the entire wiki. The P5 is established and populated by a hand-picked team of bigots, prudes and Lickspittles, whose advice Fast Eddie ignores when it conflicts with his own prejudices.
2 to 9 July, 2012
Vorticity runs a crawler to get all of the content of the TV Tropes wiki in source form.
1 November 2013
The first page of All The Tropes is imported to the Orain servers, Blaxploitation. The page was randomly selected by Perl's hash algorithm at some point in the conversion process.
All The Tropes got its first media mention on Hacker News.
9 June 2014
The first time we passed 200 edits in a single day to the Main namespace, thus filling up Recent Changes. (Excludes times where we were moving a bunch of pages, because it's easy to get 15 in one go there.)