I was just doing some housecleaning over at enwiki; deleting some old subpages, etc. Turns out someone welcomed my former bot back in March (shows how often I take notice of enwiki).

Ended up being a sockpuppeteer, but whatever. Looking back, I don’t think anyone slapped a {{welcome}} template on me back in ’05 :) The history indicates the template has been around since July 11, 2004. Funny, a lot of the original wording has survived to this day:

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

Those words have pretty much remained unchanged since the first revision. And hell, “How to edit a page”, “How to write a great article” and the monolithic “Manual of Style” have been included links since the first version. Some things on Wikipedia never change.