Wikipedia talk:April Fools' Main Page/Did You Know/Archive 2011

New Rules section?[edit]

Hi, so after this year and the misunderstanding about the rules i think we should better lay out what they are. Below is my suggested addition to the main April Fools DYK page under a new "Rules" section...

April Fools Did You Know items should present some trivia that can be presented in a manner that is possibly unbelievable to the reader. This can be done through words or names that mean two different things, shortened names, unbelievable facts, unrelated facts, etc. The normal written and unwritten rules for Did You Know (DYK) are followed, with these exceptions...

DYK articles, for the April Fools DYK, are allowed to be taken from the year prior to April Fool's Day, as long as they have not previously been featured on DYK. The normal "5 day" rule for expansion and nominating is not followed. The article must be created between last April 1st and next March 31st, or have been expanded five times the size it was last April 1st by next March 31st. This exception started in 2006 and has been utilized since.
Proper capitalization, title formatting, and linking standards, may be disregarded only if doing this properly will give away the joke. This should be done as little as possible. (example from 2009: "... that Caviar, Chardonnay, and Hot Cocoa compete for the love of Ray J? ")

All other Wikipedia rules and guidelines still apply. Pay special attention to Wikipedia's Biographies of living persons guidelines if your hook relates to a living person.

Remember, we are trying to confuse and mislead Wikipedians and visitors, not lie to them. Keep all hooks and articles completely truthful, but outrageous. (examples from 2010: A hook claiming Dmitry Medvedev died in 2005 is ok, saying Mikheil Saakashvili died is not.)

I feel this spells out all the rules we have come up with over the past few years. Did i forget something? did i say something wrong? Any comments or ideas? please let me know then we may be able to put this on the 2011 page.--Found5dollar (talk) 01:37, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Very good! I don't like the word "simply" but otherwise it looks complete. Royal broil 02:23, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To avoid changing 2010 and 2011 every year: "... between last April 1 and next March 31, or have been expanded five times the size it was last April 1 by next March 31." Art LaPella (talk) 02:33, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. Fixed those two pints, and "following" to "these" because it just was to repetitious. Anything else or is this good to go?--Found5dollar (talk) 02:40, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I did a few minor grammar issues, good to go. Royal broil 03:22, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Our edits were too close together so I missed your edit, Found5dollar. I suggestion "This should be done as minimally as possible." -> "This should be done as little as possible." Royal broil 03:26, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ok cool. I changed that and will copy it to the front page... feel free to fix my grammar more if you see other screw ups over there.--Found5dollar (talk) 03:29, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

International jokes[edit]

Thanks everybody for all your hard work this year in this field. Because I contributed so many hooks, and because competition for selection is more pressured than normal DYK, I felt I should not help with reviewing this year - although I would like to do so next year, if permitted. So with an intention to assist in future, I'd like to make an additional point, please.

There are a great many jokes which are cultural, and they amuse only those who belong to that culture. I saw some hooks turned down on the grounds that reviewers did not understand them (even when explained) or that the jokes did not work for them. That is fair enough, and no reviewer should be expected to promote something he/she does not understand. I'm glad I wasn't reviewing, as I didn't understand some of the American jokes which went on the front page. With normal DYK, reviewers can leave the obscure hooks to others who are knowledgeable in that subject, but it's not possible with April Fools' Day DYK with a deadline and few reviewers.

On the other hand, there are obviously a few jokes which are truly international. For example, the UK Guardian online newspaper noticed the featured article about wife-selling, and recognised that it was a double-bluff - so that one worked well.

I would suggest that next year we should make the choice between either having only truly international jokes which are guaranteed to work for everyone, or that we have a genuine selection of jokes from different cultures, reflecting the proportionate readership. For both options we would have to make sure beforehand that we had invited sets of reviewers from the main English-speaking areas, e.g. from U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe etc. I accept that this would make the task a greater hassle, and we would have to ask contributors to send in hooks at least a month early to make sure the team had time to deal with it without rushing too much.

I am just thinking aloud here, and I won't mind if you dismiss the idea immediately. I was prompted to do this because I was saddened to see some good jokes (not just mine!) put aside for a lot of reasons which could have been avoided, and those reasons were nobody's fault.--Storye book (talk) 10:12, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

First of all thank you for the many hooks and work you put in this year, Secondly, yes! we would love more reviewers next year espicaly someone like you.

Ok, now onto your suggestion. While i completly understand where you are coming from, i am not sure if it would realy work. Wikipedia is founded on the principles of verifibility and community editing, where April fools is founded on misdirection and jokes. We all know humor is subjective, and humor by commity never works so these two premises directly oppose each other. We still have been able to overcome this and push through some great queues over the past couple of years. I think the best way to get arround the "international" issue is alot like what happened with the "Guiness" hook this year. When i didnt get it, i did not flat out dismiss it and move it to the "no" pile, i merely said that i didn't get it. After that you stepped in and filled me in on the joke. After i understood it, i verified it and it ended up in the gueue. Most of the time we have to just go with what we get for hooks. Trying to lead them in anyway, be it truly internation jokes, or a selection from different cultures would be confining the editors too much, and my diminish the quality of some hooks IMHO. I like your thought process on this, but i am just worried it will muddle the process even more than it already is. We dont want jokes that are too geographicly specific, but at the same time a few of then do not hurt one bit. Just my lunch break thoughts!--Found5dollar (talk) 17:07, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. I've said my bit. Thanks for all your kind help this year. I think the DYKSTATS show that this year's effort worked quite well, anyway - you guys can be proud.--Storye book (talk) 21:29, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with both of you. I was supposedly "in charge" the past 2 years, and I would approve and use hooks a lot more liberally than we did this year. If they made sense and appeared to be funny to a fairly decent sized portion of the English speaking population, then I approved it. There was plenty of room on the main page this year to fit a few in the middle. I would've liked to see a hook like ...that Lake X has water in it? - completely obvious and the joke is on the reader for reading it. Royal broil 23:28, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, no, no - this is getting boring.[edit]

BOR-RING!!!: I think it's long-past time to "Just Say No!" to this kind of entry. Ships and planes and cities and mountains are VERY frequently named after famous people, and sometimes two people have the same name...there, that's it...amazing isn't it? Hence there is an almost endless supply of this kind of basically unsurprising, unamazing, downright bloody obvious entry. If we just fill out the DYK section with the same old thing - it's going to stop being convincing - and certainly stop being interesting, funny, whatever.

Heck, I can come up with dozens of these with almost zero thought - they are formulaic...and to prove that, here is the formula:

Pick any famous person.
Search for their name - or follow the dab page for their name if there is one.
Pick any entry, it almost doesn't matter which one.
Read the article and find the stated fact that least fits the person you were first thinking of.
Rinse, repeat, ad nausiam.

So - these took less than 30 seconds each:

DYK "...that Queen Elizabeth the second has over two thousand heads?"
DYK "...that the remains of John F. Kennedy are available to any municipal corporation for public display"
DYK "...that President George Bush no longer accepts cash".

I can make dozens and dozens of these in no time flat. It takes no creativity whatever.

So - I vote: "No more of these kinds of entries unless they are very special."...we need to be more selective and much more inventive. This kind of April fool entry is NOT the best we can do - it's lazy thinking. SteveBaker (talk) 00:58, 17 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Seriously the Bush one cracked me up. –HTD (ITN: Where no updates but is stickied happens.) 16:30, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It might be funny once - but if you're a reader and there are five DYK hooks - so you go to the first one and discover that, no, we didn't mean President George Bush (the person) - but instead were talking about a freeway named after him ("Hahaha!") - and then in the second entry that we weren't talking about Dr Who (the person) but instead about a flower that's named after him ("haha")...then pretty much the rest of the entries will become really obvious and un-funny. Once you can see what's coming, you just know that "Ice Cream" is going to be the name of some kind of plant ("meh - I bet there is something good on YouTube") and that "Rudjard Kipling" is going to be a boat named after the author (<crickets>) - you aren't even going to click on them. This is just lame, predictable, tedious repetition of the same kind of pathetic association.

IMHO, we should try to restrict ourselves to at most one or two of these kinds of entry each year - and work harder to ensure that when we do perform this trick that we use only the best of them with the least obvious hooks.

Sadly, of this year's list of entries, at least 10 of the 14 remaining candidates are of the "two things that happen to have the same name" variety - and maybe 7 or 8 of those are of the even more obvious "this is named after that" variety. Really, the only amazing/surprising one out of the whole bunch is the "Candy Desk" entry - which is really in the spirit of what we should be doing here. Sadly, two others that had promise (Automucophagy and my nomination: "Ian Fleming & Mercedes" both had to be dropped because of the "article expansion" rule.

I think we are in trouble here. If we aim for a quality product here - and restrict ourselves to at most one or two of the "A is named the same as B" entry - then we have only about four things to submit to DYK this year...which means that we have a lot more work to do. SteveBaker (talk) 14:01, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would just like to point out that none of the three examples you posted would be accepted. The articles have not been created or expaned 5x since last April 1st.--Found5dollar (talk) 16:46, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but that's not the point. The point is simply that this form of joke is unfunny after the first or second use of it...yet 80% of the offerings we've had so far have taken this form. SteveBaker (talk) 19:18, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Non-eligible Candidates section[edit]

I just created a "Non-eligible Candidates" section and moved some noms there. Automucophagy no longer exists as an article, "Ian Fleming & Mercedes," "Sales Operations," and "Bimbo Bakeries USA" were nominated with out any article expansion. The last 3 articles i have no problem with them being renominated if expanded.--Found5dollar (talk) 17:52, 21 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Abandoning the "expansion" rule.[edit]

IMHO (and see my diatribe about unfunny entries above) - we have a problem with finding entries that are both funny and new enough/expanded enough to meet the "5x rule". However, I don't see the point of the 5x rule for April Fools day. During the rest of the year, the requirement that an article be (effectively) new in order to get a coveted spot on the front page serves Wikipedia by encouraging new articles and the expansion of stubs - and serves to limit the number of entries that the DYK team have to consider every day - and that is a laudable goal and a great rule.

However, on April 1st, we bend that rule so far that it can't possibly be performing that role of encouragement. Nobody will have been expanding an article in mid-July in the hope that it'll make it onto the April 1st page next year! Also, there is no saving of effort for the DYK team because we, here on the April 1st project do that job for them on this one particular day of the year.

I think we should seriously consider dropping this rule in order that we can use the entire pool of 3.5 million articles rather than the every shrinking pool of newly created articles.

The rate of article creation on Wikipedia is dropping fast. In part due to a tightening of notability rules - and in part because there are only just so many things in the world that can be written about. That translates directly into a steadily worsening quality of April 1st DYK entries...and this years' set are, quite frankly, awful. There are so many amazing, surprising, wonderfully weird facts in this encyclopedia that we could be using here - but cannot because of this rule.

Our readership really don't give a damn about how recently an article was written...they do give a damn (and frequently say so!) if our April 1st choices are lame...and this year, at least 80% of them (IMHO) fall into that category.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:13, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am very much against this suggestion. Every year about a week or so before April First we get inundated with hooks. The small number on the suggestions page is probably not even 1/6th of the suggestions we will end up getting. Normally we have to add one or two extra queues for April Fools because of the sheer number. The 5x expansion rule keeps this DYK section in keeping with the concept of DYK (featuring new content) while at the same time allowing an easy way to trim out articles that effort was not put into. There are some strong willed editors on Wiki that don't want anything done for April First, and right now we have a struck a balance that is OK with most editors. If you are afraid of April Fool's DYK being boring, why not create or expand some articles that have funny, surprising, or weird hooks, and review other hooks to keep the quality at a high standard. --Found5dollar (talk) 23:48, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Declined hooks for new articles[edit]

I asked Materialscientist about the situation for new articles, that will not get promoted for April 1, and would be too late to nominate in regular DYK, and he advised me that they could be nominated in both places, but I thought that the easiest way to proceed is to nominate those only in one place, here. If they are not promoted for April 1, they could be moved from here directly to a queue. Why to deny DYK for new (not more than 3 -3.5 weeks old) articles. It is about time those spend in regular DYK before being moved to a queue anyway. Besides those hooks could be used on March 31 and/or April 2. After all, when it is April 2 in London, it is still a few hours of April 1 in San Francisco :-) --Mbz1 (talk) 18:52, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Need more?[edit]

How's the hook situation so far? I have some ideas for a few hooks, but would save them for next year if there were already enough for this year. Sasata (talk) 18:00, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Too bad[edit]

Too bad we can't nominate this one:

Did you know that... It's Friday, Friday, got to get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend. ~A H 1^(TCU) 01:10, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]