/Well, I think it was easily worth it. On the "fun people" scale, you'd expect encyclopedia editors to be right down there with accountants and morticians, but April Fool's demonstrated that, as a community, we have the capacity to step back for a day and not take ourselves quite so seriously (even if 99% of the time we're acrimoniously bitching about VfD or Autofellation etc...) I'll add my thanks to all those people, too.
-- Matt [[User:Matt Crypto]]
/I'm not against having fun, nor are most of the people who argued against encouraging the April Fools Day insanity. On the other hand, surely there's a better way to have fun than vandalizing wikipedia, because - don't kid yourself - that's exactly what was going on.
--Mark
Mark Pellegrini said:
there's a better way to have fun than vandalizing wikipedia, because
- don't kid yourself - that's exactly what was going on.
I dealt with several instances of vandalism that day, no more than usual, and according to my log only one of them could be attributed to April 1. That there was an explosion of vandalism on April 1, 2005 is a myth. There were some bits of localized insanity which were very much in keeping with the spirit of this centuries-old joke day. I categorically did not find any more vandalism than expected on a normal day. I cannot believe that I have to defend April 1 jokes on a system like Wikipedia--whatever happened to being bold?
Tony,
I don't know about page vandalism, but I do know that the navigation structure of the site was messed with by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Fennec, and Pakaran. Such changes can easily make the site effectively unusable for newbies.
I ask you not to dismiss concerns about this matter too easily as "boring people not getting it." The very real problem here is that on an openly editable site, everyone seems to feel they have license to make their own little joke, and the accumulation of all of them together is a little too much. A lot of serious magazines and newspapers have an April Fool's joke, but very few have more than one.
As an educational resource, we have a responsibility to maintain the integrity and the accessibility of our information. People should feel that they are visiting a site run by people with a sense of humor, but it shouldn't look like a site run by drunk teenagers either.
As such, I propose two simple rules for next year:
1) There will be one well-coordinated joke for the *outside* world, Whether it's a featured article, a press release, or anything else can be decided by the cabal on the to-be-created fools-l@wikimedia.org mailing list ;-).
2) Jokes *within* the community are limited to the Wikipedia:, User: and *Talk: namespaces. MediaWiki:, Template:, Image: and articles are off limits. Jokes should not be overly disruptive.
There's still plenty of room for spontaneity, but sanity and integrity to the outside world are preserved.
Erik