[Foundation-l] Semi-protection on April Fools

[michael_irwin at verizon.net]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>Do I think that April Fools will in any way irreversibly damage the
>Wikimedia project family? Of course not - we've dealt with it last
>year, we'll survive it this year. Do I believe that the combination of
>admins, regular users and anons hammering away on different pranks
>will make our site look amateurish and unprofessional in the eyes of
>some visitors? 
>  
>
Too bad the general wikiversity URLs are not setup yet.

Perhaps the April fools could be usefully (pragmatically, efficiently, 
efficaceously, simply) diverted to an environment designed/intended for 
interaction between participants in learning processes rather than 
checking and delivering precisely correct information.

After all an April fool is likely looking for immediate human reactions 
and interactions.   Other students/participants are also likely to be at 
wikiversity expecting human interaction.  Surely those seeking 
authoritative reference texts absent goofball influences are more likely 
to start at the premier Wikibooks showcase shelf or perhaps even 
Wikipedia itself?  (After engaging the read only interlock safeties of 
course!)

April fool's might even be useful in building the initial Wikiversity 
community fabric vs. detrimental to the public perception of the awesome 
tome that Wikipedia has become in these few short years of 
professionalism on public parade.

Consider our nefarious goal to break Hank Aaron's home run records.

Is it best to:

1.  Restrict all professional and amateur batters to official gametime 
batter boxes under paying public scrutiny and on their best politically 
correct behavior at all times as per rulings relayed from the on high 
commissioner says cabal?

2.  Create little leagues, locker rooms, off season sandlot pickup, nerd 
baseball nintendo, practice cages, college playoffs, all star games, 
drug labs, drug czars, etc. in the possibly vain hope that a few minutes 
of professionalism will emerge at appropriate times under the bright 
lights and professional camera crews of the world's professional sports 
industries.

3.  Pray to the allmighty for special deliverance and personal success 
in our newfound mission.

4.  Relax and check back online in a decade or two.

5.  Not disclose secret/proprietary strategies to the community at large 
until commercial potentials have been explored exhaustively with 
potential partners and/or allies.

or

6.  Bask in the glow of past success, serene in the knowledge that Hank 
Aaron's accomplishment is the pinnacle of all human achievement.  All 
that remains is to Ebay the paraphernalia.

Perhaps this year for our community April Fools joke we could send 
representatives or self selected volunteers to various professional 
conferences exploring the use of public wikis in freeing the 
curriculum.  Then we could leave the URLs inactive or temporary and 
subject to constraints imposed by other ad hoc project teams and 
committees.   Confused new arrivals could also be referred to commercial 
competitors.  This might protect Wikiversity indefinitely from the 
overly explosive growth that did such tremendous damage to the original 
Wikipedia puddle.

Of course, this unprofessionalism might also backfire and reflect poorly 
on Wikipedia or Wikimedia itself within professional academic circles.   
Perhaps some academic somewhere will choose to free the curriculum by 
convincing his/her information technology staff to first mirror and then 
later fork portions of the awesome Wikimedia products applicable or 
useful to students of his/her discipline.   Better to initialize from 
scratch or wade through the attributions and weed the crapola?   "Disk 
space is cheap," replies the perky uncredentialed web administrator.  
"We can only mandate so many student effort hours.  Therefore we need 
some strange attractors.  The Bio informatics guys are looking for ways 
to demonstrate the power of genetic algorythms to the Pentagon again.  
Let's set it up in all six orthogonal permutations and reinforce the 
ones that successfully attract volunteer learning communities when the 
future waves of grant monies roll in."

Obviously such an exploit would inevitably be tainted by academic 
rivalries and lose the valuable neutrality that Wikiversity's prefounder 
and original proponent (Mav149) has identified as a potentially valuable 
differentiating feature of our Wikimedia branding strategy.

Therefore DO NOT PANIC!  There is no rush or urgency!  The world has 
waited thousands of years for near universal free access to human 
knowledge and can certainly wait a few more decades.   If some stodgy 
academics choose to compete or initiate activity independent of the 
Wikimedia Foundation then our local communities should have no trouble 
absorbing them back into the NPOV fold.  No one truly needs our free 
information products for anything of any real importance anytime sooner 
than yesterday. 

Does anyone know offhand exactly what the current holdups on activating 
the official wikiversity URLs is or have pointers to applicable minutes 
newer than Jan 2006?

Well, gotta go play tiddly winks and maybe help develop our April Fool's 
joke for Wikimania 2006, 2007, .... 2010.   Say .... I wonder if that 
monolith followed proper black body theory as articulated in proposed 
foundation policy or if Jimmy said they could do something else for 2005.

Regards,
lazyquasar