Wikipedia:Rules for Fools

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This fool did not follow the rules and was punished by being crushed under a heavy wooden door.

April 1 of every year is April Fool's Day. Even many of the most respected publications use this day to intentionally deceive their readers in harmless and amusing ways. Wikipedia, being openly editable, is susceptible to more fooling around than perhaps any other publication. Some basic rules for fools are needed to make sure that humorless gits don't get into silly fights with pathetic pranksters.

The proposed rules are as follows:

1. There will be one "official" Wikipedia April Fool's joke to the outside world -- a press release, a fake article, or something else. If you would like to participate in that joke, the IRC channel #wikipedia-fools on irc.freenode.net can be used by the responsible cabal in the days leading up to the holiday to coordinate the joke.
2. There can be some harmless inside pranks which do not affect the reader experience of the site.

To elaborate on 2), all inside pranks are limited to the Wikipedia:, User:, and discussion namespaces. You can send others silly messages, you can vote for deletion on featured articles, you can redirect your user page -- but please don't disrupt the editing process. The navigation of the site (MediaWiki: namespace) is off limits, as are all templates used in the article namespace, and articles themselves. Any foolish changes there will be instantly reverted by the Anti-Fool-Police.

Suggestion: MediaWiki: messages may be modified if they only show up to sysops (e.g. delete -> annihilate, block -> crush by elephant); messages showing for normal users and anons are off-limits. r3m0t ^talk 14:49, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)

Why, exactly? Then you're limiting the 'joke' to admins and thats not much good. Hedley 17:13, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Because there are concerns that noobs will get confused. "edit this page" -> "vandalise this page", for example, was probably a bad idea. dbenbenn | talk 17:44, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If it isn't allowed for things visible to all, I don't see why sysops should be allowed to mess around with their templates. Hedley 19:18, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

In general, if someone doesn't like your joke and reverts it, don't revert back and try to find some alternative way to do mischief instead. But always keep in mind that Wikipedia has a responsibility to the learning public to provide reliable, useful information. The biggest sin on April Fool's Day is to vandalize regular encyclopedia articles. Such edits can and will be treated in the normal fashion, i.e. with reverts and bans. Fools who do not follow the rules will be mercilessly crushed!