On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 11:53:00AM -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
A few people have hoped that I would weigh in with an
opinion.
I'm torn. I think it's really fun, but we're also a very serious
project. So I gave it some thought and I have this idea...
Just for fun, why don't we have a game on Friday to create an
alternative main page, linked from the main page? "Click here to see
our April Fool's Page."
And on that page, we have fun with ourselves... nothing mean spirited
against each other, but gently having some fun with our quirks. So
yes, the feature article can be the european toilet paper page. But
we also could have an article about Gdansk
^h^h^h^hDanzig
^h^h^h^hGdansk!
Danzig, dammit!
In this way, we get to have a little fun with the holiday, but we also
don't abandon our seriousness for the day. And at the end of the day,
everything can be locked and archived and deleted, and we can do it
once a year.
Maybe if a developer can be persuaded, we could set the whole thing up
at
AprilFools.wikipedia.org or something like that.
I know this is probably a bit too late to bother, at this point, but I
have what I think would be a better idea, and would satisfy to some
degree both the spirit of an April Fool's hoax and the integrity of the
Wikipedia project:
Yes, make a separate page. Don't make it a link. Have the hoax page
convey the joke visually in a mere few seconds so that one needn't sit
around and read it to get the joke. When the site first loads, the hoax
page comes up. After about five seconds, it reloads with the "real"
front page of the site.
I can see how this might not be an ideal solution: there are a number of
potential problems with it, not least of which is the fact that it would
be a pain in the arse to implement (especially when so much of the day
is already gone), but it's an idea anyway.
--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite |
http://ccd.apotheon.org ]