Oh wow. Reading the flak this years April Fools Day has gotten kinda makes me a little embarrassed for participating. I mean its a day for laughs and in the end we recieved disappointment. GamerPro64 15:38, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I always find the angst about April Fools Day to be rather amusing. But if you look at pageview stats for the DYK hooks, I think it is also clear that they are extremely popular with readers. I did one of the DYK hooks, Sam LoPresti. The article had 7000 views on April 1 against a daily average in March of just over 10. Comparing against some of my other DYKs on obscure hockey players, Bill Cook had about 500 views on its DYK day against 20ish on a normal day, and Mickey MacKay was 800 against 15-20 for a normal day. For some other of this year's April 1 gags, James Bond (American football) had 7500 views, Śmigus-Dyngus had 47,000 (!), John le Fucker was around 16,700 and Clive Mantle was at 25,000. Personally, I think our annual debates about whether or not it is appropriate to use the main page for gags considerably misses the point. Our main page gags gets readers interested in a wide variety of topics they never would read otherwise. And that is far more useful and valuable to this project than yet another attempt to MFD a core policy page or RFA a known vandal, or other similar, tedious pranks. Resolute 15:40, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I did create a joke AfD. No, I do not feel ashamed about it. Why would I? I did five things that I feel are important for such a piece:
I did not edit the actual article page (keeping it out of article space - though in this instance it might have been a good joke to do it with, I respected the suggested guidelines).
I used the humor template on the AfD page.
For the subject, I used something that could be tied to the last 364 days historically (the Harlem Shake, which became big in early February of this year).
Had it been allowed to run its course, I would have closed it.
Look at a "proposal" I make back in 2011. No one complained, everyone knew it was a joke, and thus it was allowed to run its course. Surely they saw I was hanging around and watching it. If you want a good source for opinion on April Fool's Day pranks, some of the people making the funny comments there might be good sources, especially TenPoundHammer (whom I believe I had alerted to the "proposal" and went over to join in). I closed the discussion in the first fifteen minutes or so of April 2 as promised, and nothing was said of it again (except perhaps on talk pages talking about what they thought of the joke, but I did not research this at the time). Heck, I've seen people make joke edits to Jimbo's talk page, such as being welcomed to Wikipedia and receiving an offer from extra-terrestrials. I myself witnessed and eventually reversed, on a different user's page, an indefinite flogging. As for my joke AfD: delete that darn Harlem Shake nonsense.
I bet reading these now, you (the reader) are getting a bit of a laugh, are you not? If certain editors here would realize that having fun like this for one day without causing actual destructive harm is actually GOOD for you, then this whole need to debate the merits of the whole thing would not be necessary. It's a chance for editors who are serious for the other 364 days to have a little fun. Done in small quantities, there is no harm intended by it, and it should be recognized as such. If anything, create a group to help control it, or dictate criteria to follow, but don't outright ban it or threaten to block editors. Wikipedia is like Google in being a top site; if Google can have a little fun, surely we can as well. And that's what I think. CycloneGU (talk) 02:26, 8 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
