:::::The original Wikipedia articles were basic HTML pages, looking like something out of 1994.  It was hideous.  At one point, I seem to recall someone playing around with the colors, and I seem to recall gold or yellow text on a purple background, but I could be misremembering.  It was so bad, you couldn't even read it on your screen, which was maybe the point.  I got the sense they didn't really want people to participate, or at least, didn't care that people couldn't read the pages.