[WikiEN-l] April Fool's Day

Fri Apr 1 07:27:53 UTC 2005

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 11:53:00AM -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> A few people have hoped that I would weigh in with an opinion.
> 
> I'm torn.  I think it's really fun, but we're also a very serious
> project.  So I gave it some thought and I have this idea...
> 
> Just for fun, why don't we have a game on Friday to create an
> alternative main page, linked from the main page?  "Click here to see
> our April Fool's Page."
> 
> And on that page, we have fun with ourselves... nothing mean spirited
> against each other, but gently having some fun with our quirks.  So
> yes, the feature article can be the european toilet paper page.  But
> we also could have an article about Gdansk
> ^h^h^h^hDanzig
> ^h^h^h^hGdansk!
> Danzig, dammit!
> 
> In this way, we get to have a little fun with the holiday, but we also
> don't abandon our seriousness for the day.  And at the end of the day,
> everything can be locked and archived and deleted, and we can do it
> once a year.
> 
> Maybe if a developer can be persuaded, we could set the whole thing up
> at AprilFools.wikipedia.org or something like that.

I know this is probably a bit too late to bother, at this point, but I
have what I think would be a better idea, and would satisfy to some
degree both the spirit of an April Fool's hoax and the integrity of the
Wikipedia project:

Yes, make a separate page.  Don't make it a link.  Have the hoax page
convey the joke visually in a mere few seconds so that one needn't sit
around and read it to get the joke.  When the site first loads, the hoax
page comes up.  After about five seconds, it reloads with the "real"
front page of the site.

I can see how this might not be an ideal solution: there are a number of
potential problems with it, not least of which is the fact that it would
be a pain in the arse to implement (especially when so much of the day
is already gone), but it's an idea anyway.

--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]