[WikiEN-l] Re: Friday's featured article

Wed Mar 30 21:08:00 UTC 2005

Richard Holton (richholton at gmail.com) [050331 01:37]:

> When I first saw the article, as a result of Viajero's original post,
> I was not thinking about April Fool's. I *glanced* at the article, and
> saw what appeared to be a very detailed, well-documented article about
> a very obscure subject -- just the sort of thing we want Wikipedia to
> have. Had I known someone with an interest in this arcane topic, I
> might have pointed them to the page, or printed a copy and handed it
> to them. Would they have immediately known this to be an April Fool's
> joke? On reading it, they would conclude that it was not a serious
> article, but would they know it was intentionally included in
> Wikipedia as a joke for all to see? Or would they assume that some
> knucklehead had added the article and no one had yet discovered it to
> remove it?

Some say we have this problem with some of our [[Wikipedia:Unusual articles]]
already. When [[Xenu]] was featured (Feb 19th), there were quite a few
people who thought it was a particularly creative piece of vandalism,
rather than the painstakingly referenced and fact-checked article on an
... unusual ... subject that it is.

(For Xenuphiles: http://static.rocknerd.org/david/xenu-2pp.pdf - how's that
for reuse of Wikipedia content. We handed out 500 of those in front of the
Church of Scientology, Tottenham Court Road, London on Saturday, just
before the London meetup. The police found it quite acceptable. After all
it's a proper objective neutral encyclopedia article, with references!)

- d.