User blog comment:BertH/News From the Community - November 2014/@comment-5578690-20141119060949/@comment-957747-20141120202617

DEmerson, that's due to organization on the Starter Wiki. The pages are imported directly from there, and as such, retain those diff IDs. Without completely wiping Starter Wiki and creating only the essential pages, this would not be able to be fixed.

But yes, that means that the first edit on most new wikias would be around 3k.