A few media stories circulated today suggesting that English Wikipedia’s main page was a model example of a spoof/fake page in the spirit of on-line shenanigans. In fact (no pun intended), there’s nothing fake or foolish about it.
According to Mark Pellegrini, long-time coordinator of the English Wikipedia front page, since 2007 Wikipedia has been running a tongue-in-cheek, but truthful smattering of wild articles on the first day of April:
Back in 2004/2005, the place was a mad-house come April fools. Highly respected people, even admins, would create fake articles. Then other people would discover them, delete the articles, and block the creators, etc. In short, come April 1, the place would go crazy.
As the person who chooses the featured articles, I was dragged into the mess. In 2005 and 2006, as a compromise, I choose the silliest featured articles I could find (Nintendo and Spoo, respectively). In 2007, Pharos had a genius idea — to feature [[George Washington (inventor)]] — and write up the main page blurb as if it were describing the actual George Washington. Everything in the blurb was absolutely true, but *a lot* of people were fooled.
Thus, a new tradition was born, which worked out well in 2008 (Ima Hogg) and this year (Museum of Bad Art). Now the true-but-sounds-like-an-obvious-hoax philosophy seems to taken root as the de-facto policy for the day.
Thus proving it’s possible to be a fact-focussed, NPOV Wikipedian and have a solid sense of humor.
See you at the MOBA!
Jay Walsh, Communications<
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