Is it over yet?
Yikes... my two favorite sites, Wikipedia and Slashdot, were totally worthless today due to an overexuberant excess of April Fool merriment. I think Wikipedia must define April 1st by GMT, because I see that the "block" links no longer read "crush by elephant," but Slashdot has posted _another_ half-dozen or so hoax articles.
Even Google News picked up a couple of April Fool hoaxes (and I do NOT mean "Google Gulp," either).
I was more productive at work today than I've been in weeks...
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
Is it over yet?
Yikes... my two favorite sites, Wikipedia and Slashdot, were totally worthless today due to an overexuberant excess of April Fool merriment.
Maybe I didn't do enough RC patrol today, but are you sure? WP seemed pretty normal to me. Everybody I showed the toilet roll holder article to loved it. My wife finally twigged around about Stonehenge.
Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
Maybe I didn't do enough RC patrol today, but are you sure? WP seemed pretty normal to me.
There was definitely more going on the last 36 hours. Obvious vandalism, is easy to detect and rollback, but were coming at a quicker rate. An anecdote and some stats:
Block log - Perhaps the best informal "vandal meter" we have, here are some quick numbers from the last week, and a partial April 1 for the list of blocked IPs and names. There is definitely a spike.
blocks-0322 4 blocks-0323 4 blocks-0324 7 blocks-0325 15 blocks-0326 14 blocks-0327 9 blocks-0328 15 blocks-0329 21 blocks-0330 6 blocks-0331 40 blocks-0401 62 (as of 21:30 EST)
Subtle edits - These were harder to detect, because some folks would take April Fools jokes from other sites, and try to insert them into Wikipedia. For example: someone tried to insert the extinct butterfly. : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Butterfly&diff=prev&oldid=... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Biology&diff=prev&oldid=11... I reverted only because I happened to be reading the list of hoaxes a few minutes before. Also, I noticed a few hoax sites actually point to Wikipedia pages, perhaps bringing more pranksters here.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Apr 2, 2005 9:35 AM, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
Is it over yet?
Yikes... my two favorite sites, Wikipedia and Slashdot, were totally worthless today due to an overexuberant excess of April Fool merriment.
Maybe I didn't do enough RC patrol today, but are you sure? WP seemed pretty normal to me. Everybody I showed the toilet roll holder article to loved it. My wife finally twigged around about Stonehenge.
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