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

Tue Mar 29 23:16:22 UTC 2005

> 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

All those takeing part will then be banned indefinetly under the
dissruption rule (and for doing it on the worng day sometimes
timezones have thier good points).

-- 
geni