What makes you think the data exists to provide this information? Most likely it just wasn't recorded.

Well I don't know, it's good to check anyway since it's important for GFDL. I'm trying to import all files from Meta Wiki to Commons.

I actually dug through the old SVN code to try to investigate this. What I found is:

• All of these uploads were made by logged-out users (which was possible in 2001/2002)
  • At first it produced the broken wikitext by not handling logged out users at all.
  • For a while the PHP code for logging the upload contained a typo (!) - $REMODE_ATTR instead of $REMOTE_ADDR in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/SVN/browse/trunk/phpwiki/fpw/special_upload.php;1014$55
  • Contrast with the code for logging normal changes: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/SVN/browse/trunk/phpwiki/fpw/wikiUser.php;1014$134, which apparently worked.

Per https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_software_upgrade_status, Meta was moved to the Phase III software on October 9, 2002, which exactly matches the end of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Log:Uploads and the start of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Upload_log

The Phase II software did not keep any other records of images in the database (other than as files physically located on the server) - the modern "image" and "oldimage" tables were added in Phase III.

So, the data required to reconstruct this is not even lost - it never was saved to the database in the first place.

Thank you for this investigation!

Also, in case you are curious, it looks like the licensing statement from era was:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/SVN/browse/trunk/phpwiki/fpw/wikiTextEn.php;1014$319

$wikiUploadAffirmText = "I hereby affirm that this file is not copyrighted, or that the copyright holder agrees to license it under the terms of the <a href=\"http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights\">Wikipedia copyright</a>." ;

changed from the even more basic

$wikiUploadAffirmText = "I hereby affirm that this file is <b>not copyrighted</b>, or that I own the copyright for this file and place it under GFDL licence." ;

in rSVN348 (https://static-codereview.wikimedia.org/MediaWiki/348.html, May 6, 2002)

Changed from

$wikiUploadAffirmText = "I hereby affirm that this file is <b>not copyrighted</b>, or that I own the copyright for this file and place it under GPL licence." ;

in rSVN134 (https://static-codereview.wikimedia.org/MediaWiki/348.html, February 12, 2002)

Changed from

$wikiUploadAffirmText = "I hereby affirm that this file is <b>not copyrighted</b>, or that I own the copyright for this file and donate it to Wikipedia." ;

in rSVN76 (https://static-codereview.wikimedia.org/MediaWiki/76.html, February 6, 2002)

Which was the label of a checkbox you had to click.

The Phase III software (writing to "Project:Upload log") used

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/SVN/browse/trunk/phpwiki/newcodebase/Language.php;9999$724

"affirmation"	=> "I affirm that the copyright holder of this file
agrees to license it under the terms of the $1.",

where $1 appears to have been replaced with a pointer to "Wikipedia:Copyrights"

Thank you, I've adjusted https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:GFDL-presumed to the following information. I'll interpret "donated to Wikipedia" as GFDL.

Although I'm not confident that's correct given there may have been a lag between committing changes to SVN and deploying them.