April Fool contest idea (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Friday's featured article)

Tue Mar 29 22:51:03 UTC 2005

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Viajero <viajero at quilombo.nl> wrote:
>
>>Although I realize this isn't the proper channel for doing so, I'd like 
>>to nominate the following for Featured Article this coming Friday:
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bishonen/European_toilet_paper_holder
>>
>
>That is not a featured article. In fact it is not even an article - it is a
>hoax. It will be removed as would any other sneaky vandalism masquerading as
>valid content. 
>
In the interests of adding to instruction creep :-), we ought to have
some ground rules for April Fool's, maybe make a contest out of it,
for instance the winner is the hoax that goes the longest without
being detected. For instance:

* New articles only, we continue to be humorless about edits to
  existing articles.
* Article must be created on 1 April, between 00:00 and 23:59 UTC.
* Detection is by the addition of a special template by an editor,
  who must also add on the talk page the evidence that the article
  is a hoax.
* The winner is the one with the longest time between creation
  and detection.
* Undetected hoaxes must be marked by their creator by the end of
  April 2; they are also counted as winners.
* Winners get moved to WP: namespace, have " (April Fool 2005)"
  added to the title (in case of inadvertant links from elsewhere),
  all internal links removed, and are added to a list of winners
  linked to from BJAODN or some such.
* Losers are deleted sometime on April 2.

The rules page can be on meta somewhere, linked from a couple
relevant places. It works to have it be advertised; more of a
challenge to include references etc that can fool a thousand
editors already on the outlook for fiction that day.

Stan